VIU offers a suite of online tools which your instructors may use for your courses. Some information about you will be saved within these tools regardless of how you interact or do not interact with online materials. Other tools may capture your information only when you actively use the tool.
Not every instructor will choose to use all of the tools listed here for your course and some courses or assignments may use or allow the use of tools not listed here. Please talk to your instructor if you have questions about what learning technologies will be used in a course.
VIU is committed to protecting student privacy in accordance with the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection Act. If you have specific questions or concerns about how VIU protects your data, please contact the privacy office at FIPPA@viu.ca
VIULearn
VIULearn is VIU’s learning management system. Every course at VIU is given an online space that can be used for sharing materials and completing activities. In order to create a user account for you, VIULearn records your name, student number, email, and course enrollment whether or not you personally use VIULearn during your time at VIU. If you use VIULearn to access course materials or complete activities, VIULearn will also collect records of how you move through your course, the work you submit, and any grades or feedback from your instructor.
VIULearn is powered by D2L’s Brightspace. All VIULearn data is stored as part of a Cloud service on AWS Canada servers located in Montreal, QB. Your data is accessed only as needed by VIU employees or D2L staff to support your learning experience at VIU.
Data related to your participation in a course that uses VIULearn is retained for up to two years after the last day of your course. Courses that are more than two academic years old will be permanently deleted each summer from VIULearn along with any associated student data. If you use the built in ePortfolio tool in VIULearn, artifacts and reflections you add to your ePortfolio are not automatically deleted. You may permanently delete items from the ePortfolio tool yourself, or request help deleting these artifacts by emailing the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning at LearnSupport@viu.ca.
VIUTube
VIUTube is VIU’s media hosting and streaming platform. If you watch a video, take a video quiz, or upload content to VIUTube the service will capture your name, student number, and any data about your participation (such as how long you watched a video, your score on a video quiz, or the content of the media you uploaded).
VIUTube is powered by the YuJa video platform. VIUTube data is stored as part of a Cloud service on AWS Canada servers located in Montreal, QB. Your data is accessed only as needed by VIU employees or YuJa staff to support your learning experience at VIU. Media you upload is shared only with the people who have access to links or embed codes you choose to share or provide on an external website.
If you submit a VIUTube video to an instructor as part of any kind of evaluation for a course at VIU, we are required to keep that media for a minimum of one year after your final grade for that course is submitted. Any media you upload that is not being used as part of the assignment of a grade for a VIULearn course can be deleted by you at any time to remove it permanently from the YuJa servers.
In order to minimize the amount of personal information stored on the YuJa platform, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning performs an annual cleanup process to remove videos that are more than one year old and have had no interactions within the last year and videos more than two years old that have not been specifically tagged with a request not to delete the content. For more information about this clean up process, please contact the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning at LearnSupport@viu.ca
Zoom
The Zoom video conferencing platform is used at VIU to facilitate remote learning. All meetings and webinars scheduled through a VIU institutional Zoom account have all data processed on Zoom’s Canadian servers regardless of the location of meeting participants or host.
Students are not required to create an account with Zoom to use this software at VIU. If you choose to create an account with Zoom, your personal Zoom account will be subject to Zoom’s privacy policy and Zoom's terms of use. Individual free and paid accounts store data on Zoom’s international servers and do not have the option to opt out of having data for their meetings processed in the USA or any other country where Zoom has servers.
When you join a meeting as a participant with or without an account, Zoom captures your display name and ip address. If the host of a Zoom meeting chooses to record the meeting, your display name, your image, and your voice may be captured in this recording. Any comments shared in the Chat may be saved by a meeting host or participant but are not included in any meeting recording. Your display name will be included in the video caption file if you speak during a recorded meeting that is using the automatic captions feature of Zoom.
Zoom recordings can be saved to the host’s local computer or to Zoom’s Canadian cloud servers. Any meetings stored on the Zoom cloud will be automatically transferred to VIUTube to be stored for a minimum of one year. Recordings are moved to the Trash folder in Zoom 1 day after they are imported into VIUTube. Recordings in Trash are permanently deleted after 30 days.
VIUBlogs
VIUBlogs is a multisite WordPress network made available to VIU staff and students to create websites, blogs, or ePortfolios while at VIU. This service is stored locally on VIU servers and administered by the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning.
The first time you log in to VIUBlogs, an account will be created for you. To create your account, VIUBlogs collects your student number. In order to receive updates about your site or invitations to join others’ sites on VIUBlogs, you will need to attach an email address to your VIUBlogs profile. You can choose whether or not to include your name or other profile information. The only required profile information for VIUBlogs is your student number which serves as the username for your account.
In order to protect your privacy, CIEL strongly recommends that you edit the Nickname on your profile to something other than your student number so you can publish posts without sharing your student number with anyone who views your VIUBlogs site.
The administrator of each VIUBlogs site can set the privacy settings for that site. Sites can be limited to only members of the site, only users of the VIUBlogs network (anyone with a working login for VIUBlogs) or made public. You can also protect specific posts or pages by adding a password if you want to make some elements of your VIUBlogs site more private than others.
The WordPress platform uses plugins to provide additional functionality. If you choose to enable any optional plugins for your site, you will be subject to the privacy policy and terms and conditions of that plugin. You can find documentation about specific WordpressPlugins online on Wordpress.org.