Banner is a relational database manager, which
basically means that information is shared among these various
modules. Any given individual could at the same time be a student, an instructor, and
employee. Information about a person--an address, for example--is
accessible from the different modules.
The first time that you use Banner, you will be
directed to a tutorial that explains the confidentiality rules that
operate as a result of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy
Act of 1974, a federal law usually referred to a
FERPA. We usually call this "FERPA training." Read on for more
information about FERPA and how it applies to you.
Who has access to information stored in Banner
is a very
sensitive matter. FERPA, also (also known as the Buckley Amendment) prohibits university employees (including
instructors and TAs) from giving out most of the information in this
database to third parties (people outside the university).
If someone from outside the university wants to know
information about a student, you are very limited in what you can say.
In general, information from records should only be given to people
outside the university by the official "custodian" of that record. The
custodian of all grades and registration is the Registrar, not the
instructor.
In an unusually drastic case, information about a
student may have to be given to a court or the police who are armed with
subpoena, but in such cases it is the Registrar's Office, not the
instructor, who will provide the information. Always consult with the
director of writing or department chair if you are being questioned by a
law enforcement agency about a student.
Some
information about employees and students, though, is considered public
until the person takes some steps to suppress that information. This
information includes such things as the following: your name, local
address, local phone number, and local email address. Anyone listed
in the Banner database--you or
your students--can fill out a confidentiality form to suppress some or all
of of this information (meaning that the university will not release it to
someone outside the university). If all the information is
suppressed, the university cannot even verify to an future employer
whether a student ever was a student, unless the student specifies exactly
who might be asking and when they might be asking. So suppressing
all the information is a pretty drastic step. But suppressing some
information, such as a local address and phone number, will prevent the
university from printing that information in the telephone directory (to
keep this from happening, though, the Registrar has to have received the
confidentiality form very early in the academic year).
As a TA or instructor, you must leave public your name
and email address (students should be able to contact you by email).
Your office and academic qualifications are also public information.
You should keep other information about yourself current on the UI
computer system, so that anyone who works for the university can get in
touch with you if they need to (including the English dept. secretaries),
even if you decide you want some of this information to be
confidential. (Please do not interpret confidentiality to mean that
your personal information is to be kept from university
employees whose job it is to work with those records.) Once you have filled out a confidentiality form, your
records in Banner always come up with the confidentiality notice, and any
UI employee should know that this information is not be released to the
general public.
Most of the information about an individual in Banner
is confidential, meaning that it cannot be given to anyone outside the
university except under special circumstances (a transcript request for
example). As an instructor, you are not authorized to give any
of this information to a third party (a student's roommate, their parents,
etc.). Even information that has been subpoenaed is not your responsibility
to release (the Registrar's office will handle this unlikely
circumstance). This information includes the following: a
student's grades (including grades that a student has earned on an
individual assignment, not necessarily recorded with the Registrar),
Social Security numbers, student ID numbers, any student registration
records (including a student's schedule), or a student's birth date.
This also means you should never leave papers that
have grades on them in an area where other students can see these
grades. For example, you should never leave graded material in hallway
outside your office for students to pick up.
You are authorized to look at the following
information about your students: their addresses and email
(confidential or not), their registration in your classes and other
classes this semester, their schedule, and their grades for the current
semester. If you are a TA, you do not have access to your students' transcript or
their test scores.
Instructors who are not TAs and departmental
secretaries have access to all registration information about
students. Department secretaries also have access to to payroll
information (this is how you get paid, to start with). None of these
people, however, is supposed to be looking up information about students
or employees that does not concern them in their job functions (for
example, a secretary or faculty member should not use his or her access to Banner to check
on their son or daughter's grades).
The Banner system also allows you access to records
about yourself. You can find out all information the university has
about your academic record, including test scores. You can also view
detailed payroll information about yourself, including details from all
pay stubs (handy for checking out how your deductions worked out, even
after you've lost the stubs themselves).
You also use the Banner system to change some of the
information stored there:
