I look at the last 20 years of progress in educational technology and while have made great strides in improving interoperability, we have moved from having each campus 100% maintaining possession their learner's private data to the point where the there is no learner private data under the direct control of many universities. Private student data is often spread across 15 or more vendor systems. It is time to understand and explore the trade off of outsourcing student identity and private learning data to third party vendors. This is a problem that is 20 years in the making - it will take some time to get to a better place in the educational technology marketplace with respect to protecting learner privacy data. Music: Peacefully by E'S Jammy Jams

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In this episode we look at FERPA in the context of other privacy frameworks and laws like FOIA, HIPAA, and HITech.   We compare FERPA to medical privacy records and look at how campuses need to move beyond FERPA to examine the real issues of learner privacy.  Music: Peacefully by E'S Jammy Jams

In this episode, we look at why higher education moved from self-hosted learning systems to completely outsourced systems between 2010 and 2020.   We look at some of the problems of self-hosted LMS systems and how higher education IT was not ready to move into the cloud and maintain "ownership" of their LMS infrastructure.  Choosing a 100% out-sourced could LMS turns out to be an excellent temporary move that has allowed IT departments to build expertise on cloud services like Amazon.  But it is time to re-look at how we provision and provide LMS services in higher education.  In the past few years it has become increasingly simple to deploy, monitor, and maintain scalable production infrastructures on Amazon.  It might be a good time to take another look at just how much of the campus learning system should be fully outsourced.  Music: Peacefully by E'S Jammy Jams