Ensuring online teaching is delivered privately

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This article will outline steps to ensure that, where appropriate, content created and/or delivered live are available only to those who are meant to access the content.

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Getting started

When creating accounts on new platforms, you should always ensure that you use a different password for each platform. To help with this, you may want to consider a password manager which can be used in the web browser of your choice to generate a secure and unique password for each site. Some browsers offer this functionality, however, standalone password managers such as Lastpass or Bitwarden often add additional functionality and can be highly recommended.

This article is currently being updated.

eStream

Content on eStream is largely only accessible to registered Trinity Laban staff and students (there is some archival content that is available to anyone). Content is securely stored and backed up on Trinity Laban servers.

There are a large number of access groups, which are normally applied based upon the Active Directory groups that a user is a member of (eg, Dance teaching staff, BA1 student, etc). Each group has access to a number of different categories, and for students in the Dance Faculty, this consists of the programme in which they are enrolled in. Teaching staff can see class recordings for any programme in the faculty (which hasn’t been uploaded privately).

As well as category filtering access to content, the upload form contains a number of fields which can further limit access to a recording – for example, you can select faculty restrictions, and whether students can access the recording.

In addition to this, all recordings are uploaded with a Publishing Policy. These further restrict access to recordings. In most cases, teachers can select from 3 options for publishing policies:

• Class Recording – If a programme is also selected, students in the tagged module will be able to access the recording, and download it for offline viewing.
• Class Recording – Non DL – If a programme is also selected, students in the tagged module will be able to access the recording, but are not able to download it.
• Private – Recordings uploaded with this publishing policy will only be viewable by the uploader (no matter what other metadata they’ve selected). This can be very useful for making a recording only available to a small number of students or colleagues by embedding it in a shared page (for example a Moodle page), where only those people able to access the page will be able to view the recording.

Students have only 1 option:

• Private – Recordings uploaded with this publishing policy will only be viewable by the uploader (no matter what other metadata they’ve selected). This can be very useful for making a recording only available to a small number of students or colleagues by embedding it in a shared page (for example a Moodle forum), where only those people able to access the forum will be able to view the recording.

Some departments have access to other Publishing Policies, however, details of how to use these should have been shared as each one has a different use case.

Microsoft Teams

Teams is Microsoft’s group communication tool, which can be a quick and easy way of enabling communication within a group – whether that group consists of 2 members or 100.

All Trinity Laban staff and students have access to Teams, as it is linked to their Trinity Laban Office365 account. Secure groups can therefore be set up which are accessible only by selected participants.

Zoom

See the article on recommended settings for Zoom.