"The Norris Situation"

She walked into IT expecting to fix a problem she had with her course management software.

What music professor Elizabeth Norris found were three people waiting for her and some man's voice coming out of a speakerphone claiming to be from the Vermont State College system. Those waiting were Chief Technology Officer Mike Dente, Dean of Administration Wayne Hamilton, Chief Information Officer for the Vermont State Colleges Linda Hilton and the man on the speakerphone was Chief Technology Officer for the VSC Rick Blood.

A combination of ignorance and confusion has caused some issues with the IT department at Lyndon State College. Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges Tim Donovan will be coming to LSC on April 26 to talk with the faculty about the VSC policy regarding data storage and how faculty should be using college-owned computers.

These issues are coming in conflict with how teachers want to teach.

One of those teachers, professor Norris, was recently found to be violating the VSC policy regarding how faculty should store students' information such as their grades, student ID numbers and if they have a disability.

The VSC policy, which can be found at tinyurl.com/vscdata, lays out what is private data and how it should be stored.

Norris had a problem using Moodle, the school's software for grading and other online class features.

"I have a doctorate in Music," she said. "I am not a stupid woman. I can't use Moodle and nobody's hearing it. Nobody's hearing those of us who aren't using Moodle say 'it is not user friendly.'"

Norris had a problem with the interface of Moodle. She attended all the workshops provided to the faculty on how to use Moodle.

There is a faculty member, electronic journalism arts professor Meghan Meachem, who knows how to use Moodle and has been assisting those with issues with it. Norris said she did not go to her because Meachem had her own work to do and was overloaded as it was.

The problem seemed to be specific to Norris because she showed her Moodle to other faculty and staff members who used it and she says her version looked much different than theirs.

"The grade book didn't tally up and I couldn't even read it because it was blue lettering on a blue background. I couldn't read any of the grades," she said. "If they want us to use a system it better work and it better work easily. I'm here to teach. I'm here to be with the students. I am here as an advisor. I don't have six hours a day, literally, to sit and try to figure this out. I just don't."

Norris went online and found an easier program, Engrade, to use for her classes. Engrade is a free course management program that allows teachers to post grades and assignments for students to use. Engrade says it is FERPA, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, compliant so Norris felt that it was safe to use. Norris also told LSC President Steve Gold and Dean of Academic and Student Affairs Donna Dalton that she was using it, so she felt she had covered her bases.

Dalton says that Norris had talked to her about how happy she was that she found a site that worked for her, but did not ask her permission to use it.

"Don't go to me," said Dalton. "I know nothing about this stuff."

Dalton admits that it did not occur to her that when Norris talked about Engrade it could have been violating the VSC policy. She also admits that she should have known the policy better herself.

"This is like many things where you know it in the abstract and then it is not until a situation comes up that you go 'Oh my gosh.'"

A situation did come up last semester where two of professor Norris' students had submitted assignments that appeared the same, so she suspected plagiarism. There was no plagiarism, but Engrade had made a mistake using one of its applications. It was later discovered that Engrade sent data to a third-party site, which could not be monitored by LSC.

"I didn't know, honest to God I didn't know, that there was a VSC policy that said 'all third-party sites must be approved by whatever office of IT,'" Norris said.

Faculty and staff not knowing the policy has been one of the main issues IT has been dealing with.

"I've found that more people don't realize they're violating the policies than know what the policy is," said Dente, LSC's chief technology officer. "We are trying to educate the people. We are trying to explain to them (what the policy is)."

Dente says that simplicity and ease of use do not trump security, so those faculty members who have been violating the VSC policy, even if it makes their job easier, will have to stop.

Dente would not comment on what happened with Norris, but he did talk about a general scenario that was similar.

"If a faculty member went out on their own and started using a third-party course management system, invited the students on their own, made them create user names and passwords and started storing personal private privileged data on that site they would be violating the VSC policy," he said.

After Norris discovered the problem with the suspected plagiarism she emailed Donna Dalton to ask her what to do.

"Instead of responding to me, she sent it to everybody else in the world," Norris said. "Mike Dente, Wayne Hamilton, Linda Hilton, I can't even remember how many other people. Suddenly, late at night, I've got this ridiculous fiasco on my hands."

Norris says she was told to go see Dente to figure out what happened and to try to fix it. She was not told that there were going to be three other people at that meeting.

"I sat down and said, 'I didn't realize that this was going to be the Spanish Inquisition. I thought it was Mike and I one-on-one.' The answer was 'no, this is standard operating procedure,'" she said.

Another LSC reaction that angered Norris was that there were emails going around about her that she was not aware of. President Gold sent out an email addressing her situation. He included in that message emails between himself and Dente, however. Gold referred to what was happening as "the Norris incident" and Dente said the situation for the school was "scary" because Norris removed the data from Engrade herself and Dente could not know exactly what data was exposed.

"A copy of those emails was sent to me, inadvertently, that I was being uncooperative," she said.

Norris disagrees that she was uncooperative.

"Every email I received from anybody I responded to and I told them exactly what I was going to do, how I was cleaning out the sites, before I did anything I told (Dente) and I told Wayne Hamilton," she said. "I told everybody what I was doing."

The one thing she would not do is hand over her user name and password to Dente so that he could go through and make sure all the protected data was removed.

"I was concerned," she said. "This was my online course. I was concerned that somebody else would clean it out and not preserve the student's work, because I hadn't had a chance to grade it all."

Norris still uses Engrade, after removing all the sensitive data. She admits that she still may be in violation of the VSC policy.

"I don't know," Norris said. "I'm planning on going to the chancellor when he's here, because I want to find out. How is this not an appropriate site? There's no sensitive information."

Norris still cannot use Moodle and says that if the school wants to use a central site like Moodle or Blackboard then it has to be user friendly.

"We faculty don't have hours and hours that we can devote to learning a system that's so clunky and so clumsy that it's got to have 24 hour support," she said. "It's stupid."