Privacy notice

Last modified: April 2022

FITech 101, referred to as the platform, is an online learning service designed and developed for offering courses. The platform supports the creation and modification of courses, the creation and modification of automatically assessed, peer-assessed, and teacher-assessed course assignments, as well as the typical online learning platform -related functionality such as grading and book-keeping.

The platform is hosted and developed at the Department of Computer Science at Aalto University ↗. For information about the platform and the courses, contact Arto Hellas (firstname.lastname@aalto.fi) or individual course teachers.

In the following, the term we refers to Aalto University ↗ and its employees responsible for the development of the platform and the courses offered on the platform. In Computer Science education, Aalto University is among the highest ranked Universities in Europe and the topmost one in Finland ↗.

The terms course participant and student refer to any user who uses the course materials offered by the platform.

Aalto University privacy notice

As this platform is developed, maintained, and hosted at the Aalto University, the Aalto University privacy notice ↗ concerns this platform too.

The following is an addendum to the Aalto University privacy notice, detailing information on the data collected by the platform and on the purpose of the data collection. For specific details not addressed here such as data retention policies, see the Aalto University privacy notice ↗.

Addendum

Purpose for processing of personal data

Creating and improving online courses and carrying teaching-related administrative tasks requires that we process personal data about course participants.

Personal data is processed to compile statistics on the use of the platform and the courses, to analyze course and assignment progress, to identify factors that relate to course and assignment progress, to identify materials and assignments that require improvement, to identify and process plagiarism, and to improve and study ways for improving online education. The platform uses automatic and teacher- and peer-assessment for grading of assignments, and course participants can see their course-specific progress on the platform.

Grading policies are course- and teacher-specific.

The main basis of processing personal data collected on this platform is legitimate interest as defined in GDPR. For further information about legal bases for processing personal data at Aalto University, see Aalto University privacy notice ↗.

Personal data

The personal data stored and collected by the platform are as follows.

Security

All collected data is stored on Aalto maintained servers in Finland and processed according to the rules of fairness and confidentiality. Access to the data is limited to a select group of Aalto employees, and technical and organizational safeguards are in place to ensure the security of the personal data.

Providing data for third parties

Personal data is not shared to third parties without consent. When sharing data, any shared data is either anonymized or pseudonymized, only the data needed for the research is shared, and in the case of pseudonymized data, agreements are made to ensure the removal of data after the research has been conducted.

Processing of personal data for automated decision-making

The platform supports offering automatically assessed tasks in courses. The platform can automatically decide whether a submitted task such as a questionnaire answer or an answer to a programming problem is correct based on a set of rules constructed by the course teacher(s). The set of rules that are used for assessing individual tasks may be improved over time by the course teacher(s).

The platform also supports offering additional assignments or materials - personalized content - based on course participants’ performance, given that course teacher(s) construct rules for assessing course participants’ performance and create a pool of optional assignments and materials. Performance on the course may be assessed using automated decision making based on a set of rules constructed by the course teacher(s).

You may disallow showing personalized content. The option is available both in the user profile and the pop up asking for consents on first page load.

Note that some parts of the material(s), depending on the course(s) and the teacher(s), can differ between course participants even if showing personalized content has been disabled. In such a case, choosing what content is shown is based on random chance and not on personal data related to the course participant. Such content includes but is not limited to questions shown in a random order, randomized content such as variable names in questions, and showing parts of materials at random from a pool of materials (e.g. different versions of the same content).

Data retention and rights

For data retention and rights of the course participant (data subject), see Aalto University privacy notice ↗.

Cookies and tracking

Cookies are text files that are placed to your computer by your computer as you visit a web site. The platform uses two types of cookies: (1) cookies from the platform and (2) third-party cookies.

Cookies from the platform

The platform uses cookies for authentication and authorization of course participants. When you open up the platform, the platform asks your computer to place a cookie on your computer. The cookie is then sent to the platform on every request, including navigating between sites and submitting assignments. The cookie makes it possible to keep track of the course participants on the platform, including making it possible to award any course points to the correct course participant.

Third party Cookies

The platform uses YouTube ↗ for storing and showing instructional videos. YouTube is an online video sharing website offered by Google. YouTube uses cookies for tracking the use of the service, including counting the number of times that each particular video is shown. We use the privacy enhanced mode of YouTube when embedding videos — this means that any cookies are set only if the videos are played by the course participant.

Browsers typically offer the opportunity to block third party cookies. For example, in Google Chrome, this can be done through Settings -> Site settings -> Cookies and data -> Block third-party cookies. Note that blocking third party cookies may influence the performance of some of the websites that you use.