Privacy
Privacy statement and the working of Caracal
Information is gathered through Caracal as part of mandatory quality assurance, to be used to evaluate courses and other components of the educational programme.
Set-up and content of an evaluation are the responsibilities of the education organization in question.
Below we explain which personal data we gather and how it is used in the system.
Personal information collected
Caracal records personal user data to ensure the correct operation of the evaluation system. This information is obtained from university sources. For students and teachers, it concerns the following data: - Solis-id / student number - name - e-mail address
Caracal may request course enrollments from Osiris, to ensure an automatic link between students/teachers and an evaluation. Users may also be linked to an evaluation manually, based on name or Solis-id.
Student course results are obtained from Osiris only as an aggregate. That is to say Caracal only stores (and may show) averages for a whole course, never individual results. This holds for the evaluation reports as well.
Roles in Caracal
Users may be assigned certain roles, with regards to the evaluation with which they are linked.
Students usually are participants, while teachers usually are owners of an evaluation.
Users may have the role of key user, allowing them to support the evaluation process. Key users are usually designated by the education organization.
Finally, users may have the role of manager, allowing them to review evaluation results. Typically, this role is bestowed on education managers and directors, and members of education committees.
Linking users to evaluations: anonymity
To make the system work, it is necessary to link participants and owners to evaluations. The link exists at least while the evaluation is open for participants, allowing them to review their own contributions.
Depending on the education organization, the link may be severed when the evaluation has been finalized. Thus, an evaluation is completely anonymized, and participants can no longer see their own contributions.
A participant may also choose to sever the link personally. The participant’s evaluation is anonymized at that point, and the participant is no longer able to see his or her own contributions.
An evaluation report will never contain participants’ personal data.
Resolvability of evaluations: anonymity
No user, in any of the roles mentioned above, will be able to relate contributions to an evaluation to the participant that contributed them. However, a participant may review his or her contributions, as long as the link between participant and evaluation exists.
An evaluation report will never contain participants’ personal data.
It is the participant’s own responsibility if, in answering an open question, he or she chooses to reveal (indirectly) his or her identity.
Sending messages to users
Sending messages to users from within Caracal is done in such a way that users initiating or sending such a mail can know any of the addressees.
E.g. an owner can send a reminder to participants who have not yet participated in the evaluation. However, the owner has no means to see which participants are involved.
Personal data visible to users
Personal user data (Solis-id/student number, name, e-mail address) is shown when, in setting up an evaluation, it is to be decided who are owners and participants for that evaluation.
A participant never sees any personal data relating to other participants.
An owner only sees personal data relating to the participants of that evaluation.
A key user only sees personal data relating to participants and owners of evaluations that are controlled by that key user.
A manager never sees any personal data relating to owners or participants.
Visibility of evaluation results: publishing settings
Caracal offers an intricate system to manage the visibility of evaluation results, or reports.
E.g. a difference can be made between users who were participants and user who were not. Within a report, answers to closed questions may be shown, while answers to open questions may be omitted.
Publishing settings may differ for each evaluation. The exact settings are determined by the education organization responsible for the evaluation in question.
Exporting data
On certain conditions it is possible to export data from (a set of) evaluations. Exports are made only on approval of the education organization concerned. Each export is fully anonymized, and no personal data is ever exported.
Exports are made e.g. to further analyze data in other packages such as SPSS.
Do you have any questions?
For questions concerning privacy and the use of personal data within Caracal, please contact the Caracal team: caracal@uu.nl
For questions concerning setup, execution, analysis and publiation of evaluations, please contact your own education organization (e.g. through Student Affairs).