District 219 has replaced online learning tool Quizlet with Knowt due to changes in Quizlet’s privacy policy and their refusal to comply with the Student Online Personal Protection Act (SOPPA).
Chief Technology Officer Philip Hintz defines SOPPA: an Illinois law intended to protect student data.
“The Student Online Personal Protection Act essentially says that any digital platform that we use or any organization that we share student information with, we have to have a data privacy agreement with that company. The data privacy agreement is about 22 pages long, and it ensures that they are going to do whatever they can to protect and keep your data private and safe, and if the company were to get hacked, they would pay for the remediation of that data breach,” Hintz said.
Quizlet’s Privacy Policy was last updated July 15 and expanded the personal information collected from users to date of birth, email address, phone number, password, physical address and IP address. It also stated personal information may be disclosed to third parties and some will be publicly displayed. District 219 requires data privacy agreements for any company collecting more data than a first name. However, Quizlet refused to sign an Illinois SOPPA agreement.
“If we don’t have a data privacy agreement with them, and they get hacked, we have no recourse to help you get your data reprotected or get you credit protection services that are typically offered to protect your identity. That is how identities are stolen,” Hintz said.
To adapt to this change, teachers were given pro accounts on Knowt and will soon undergo training from the technology department to learn how to use it. German teacher Josef Neumayer explains what teachers hope to learn from training.
“There’s a lot of options in Knowt, and there seem to be some features that I think would take a long time for me to play around with and learn to use, and I would rather spend my time giving students feedback and planning for quality lessons. It would take a long time for me to figure out all these extra perks. Some of them are interesting, like the Artificial Intelligence (AI) which could be good for feedback for students that I’m interested in learning more about,”
So far, Neumayer prefers Knowt to Quizlet because it requires more student engagement.
“It seems like Knowt requires the students to do more than Quizlet did; there were a lot of workarounds and cheats that students were using with Quizlet that they aren’t able to do in Knowt because the AI in the background is evaluating whether the students are mastering the terms or not, so I think they’re getting a little more quality practice and feedback. I think Knowt is a good substitute, or maybe even better,” Neumayer said.
Junior Malaya Martinez said the switch hasn’t been a major disruption from a student perspective.
“I like it and I don’t think there’s much of a difference, but I just feel it’s kind of an inconvenience to put everything on Knowt for teachers,” Martinez said.
