At Outschool we care deeply about our learners’ safety and privacy. We know that the educators who use our platform do, too. There are many ways that we protect learners on our platform, ranging from limiting what personal data our learners share to requiring that our educators report any child abuse a learner shares with them.

To that end, Outschool’s class approval process takes into account learners’ privacy rights when determining which external teaching tools are appropriate for our learners to access and to use while taking an Outschool class. This includes external websites or learning management systems. We do this both because we care but more importantly because there are legal requirements (COPPA) that dictate what external teaching tools may be used with learners under 13 years old, and what we as a company must do to ensure that parents properly consent to their children using those tools. Below is a more detailed explanation of what measures we take to comply with COPPA, and what it means for our educator community. This policy is announced in November of 2021 and will go into effect January 1, 2022.

Outschool takes measures to build safety and security into our learners’ experiences. While we want our learners to build strong communities and connections at Outschool, we also want to protect their data that they choose to share with us. Further, the law requires this. The FTC enacted COPPA in order to place parents in control of what information is collected from their young children (under 13) online. COPPA was in part designed because of the belief and research indicating that younger children may lack the ability to fully understand what happens to their personal data when they share it online. For example, a website attracting children under 13 might encourage children to create accounts and share their email addresses, so that the children can earn “points” to use on the site; that website could then improperly use those email addresses to market their products to children, or even sell those email addresses to other websites who would then target those children. Those deceptive practices resulted in more stringent practices and requirements that parents play a larger role in overseeing their children’s online interactions.

What that essentially means is that online platforms for children under 13, like ours, must explicitly tell parents what data we collect from their learners, what happens to that data, and how they can access and/or delete that data. It is critical that Outschool provide parents with accurate information about what data their children share and what happens to that data so that parents can make informed decisions about whether their children can or should share their data.

Similarly, those requirements apply to any websites or learning management systems that Outschool educators use with learners under 13 during their classes. It’s critical that educators who use our platform are transparent and proactively flag in their class descriptions which external teaching resources they’ve selected. This is because we want to proactively tell parents what websites their children will access, and give parents the opportunity to assess whether they want to allow those websites to collect data from their children, as well as provide consent to such practices. We want to avoid the situation where an educator sends learners to a website and that website collects data from those learners and misuses it, without parent involvement.

We’ve therefore refined our processes in order to help educators pick enriching resources that are also approved for learners to use. Below is an explanation of how the class submission process works where an educator wants to use external teaching resources.

Provided that you’ve met the requirements above, you’ll be able to disclose the resources you’ll be using in class when you set up your class listing. Make sure to add each resource that will be used separately.

Unapproved resources for kids under 13

Note: This list of unapproved resources is only applicable if you are trying to send learners to these external websites or resources. You can use materials--such as Vimeo--in your classroom presentations and lectures as long as you are not linking to them or giving learners under 13 a way to click in to any of these sites.