Understanding FERPA as a Service

With the increased distribution of Person data outward from Campus Solution as the system of record, institutions need the ability to determine whether students have elected to protect their information under U.S. FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) regulation, as well as the actual data elements they want protected. FERPA as a Service provides a publish or notify capability that indicates to external systems updates have been made to a student's denoted restrictions as well as a query and read capability that conveys the students indicated FERPA restrictions.

FERPA as a Service is designed to facilitate integration of the PeopleSoft system with external systems. The service can be divided into two categories: Inbound service and Outbound service.

• The Outbound FERPA service facilitates keeping the constituent FERPA data restrictions synchronized with an external system.

  The Outbound FERPA service is an asynchronous service that will publish the FERPA data whenever it is updated in Campus Solutions.

• The Inbound FERPA service allows integrated systems to determine if FERPA restrictions are set up for a person and to retrieve what data elements those restrictions are set up for.

  The Inbound FERPA service is a synchronous web service that provides the EmplID as the request parameter and it includes the FERPA flag and FERPA record/field data elements as a response.

The base message for the service consists of the person's EmplID, the FERPA flag, and the record/fields specified through the FERPA Control component (FERPA_CONTROL). Administrators must review the FERPA_VW records in their system and configure them to reflect the type of information that their institution uses as directory information. The FERPA_VW records available are defined on the CC_FERPA_SEL_VW record. These view records can be modified by the institution and include specifying additional fields to incorporate more information within the same FERPA-controlled category. In addition, administrators can create and add new FERPA_VW records to add new categories to their systems FERPA control.