✨Tutorial: Easy Student Consent Management in Google Workspace

Welcome to AutomatED: the newsletter on how to teach better with tech.

Each week, I share what I have learned — and am learning — about AI and tech in the university classroom. What works, what doesn't, and why.

In this fortnight’s Premium edition, I present a Tutorial for efficiently managing student consent in Google Workspace. This is an easy-to-implement, effective, and generalizable way to gather and tabulate your students’ consent (or lack thereof) for your use of recording software in class or in professor-student meetings or for your use of AI tools with their work.

In my recent ✨Guide to Ethically Using AI with Student Data, I present seven options:

• 🛑 Option 1: Don’t Run Student Data Through AI

• 🦺 Option 2: Limit to “Completely Safe” Categories

• 🏰 Option 3: Stay Within Your Ecosystem

• 🗣️ Option 4: Change the Consent Paradigm

• 🥷 Option 5: Pseudonymize or Anonymize

• 💻 Option 6: Use Local LLMs

• 🔀 Option 7: A Combination of the Above

In this Tutorial, I explain how to reduce the cost and inconvenience of recording student consent in the Google ecosystem while improving transparency and communication with your students. This sort of solution is needed if you take Option 4 in the aforementioned Guide.

But why might you take Option 4 and attempt to change the consent paradigm with your students?

Here is an extended excerpt from the Guide of some of the considerations:

With these considerations and alternative Options in mind, let’s consider one simple way to make large scale consent acquisition, management, and recording much simpler, at least within the Google ecosystem.

📝 Step 1 - Create Form(s)
for Collecting Consent

The first step in simplifying the process of acquiring student consent is to create a structured and clear method for gathering their permissions. Utilizing Google Forms provides an efficient and user-friendly way to achieve this. With Google Forms, you can design customized forms that specifically cater to your needs, ensuring that all necessary information is collected in an organized manner. This not only streamlines the process but also enhances transparency and trust with your students by clearly communicating what they are consenting to.

Creating these forms involves setting up fields to capture essential details, such as the student's name and email address, and presenting the consent options in a straightforward format. By using Google Forms' features, you can ensure that all responses are validated, reducing the chances of errors or incomplete submissions. Additionally, as I will show below in the subsequent Steps, the responses can be easily managed and recorded within the Google ecosystem, making it convenient for future reference and compliance purposes.

Let’s get started! Here is how to proceed:

1. Open Google Forms with your institutional account

2. Click the "+" button to create a new form

3. Title the form (e.g., "Class 123: Professor-Student Meetings Consent Form").

4. Add a description at the top that discloses what you are planning to do with the relevant student data. In short, this description should outline what you are requesting that the student consent to.

Obviously, the form that your description ought to take is complicated and context-sensitive. In this Tutorial, my focus isn’t on the details of a good and legally compliant description. However, I will flag a few of the complications here, using an excerpt from my ✨Guide to Ethically Using AI with Student Data. Note that this is an excerpt focused on the specific case of using student data with AI tools, but the points generalize to recordings and other cases where student consent is needed:

5. Add the first question to capture the student's name

   • Click "Add question" (the plus sign).

   • Choose "Short answer" as the question type.

   • Label it "Name".

   • Make it a required question.

6. Add the second question to capture the student's email address

   • Click "Add question".

   • Choose "Short answer" as the question type.

   • Label it "Email Address".

   • Make it a required question.

   • Click on the three dots in the bottom right and select "Response validation".

   • Choose "Text" -> "Email address" to ensure the input is in email format.

7. Add the third question for consent

   • Click "Add question".

   • Choose "Multiple choice" as the question type.

   • Label it as you like (e.g. "Do you consent to the above?".

   • Provide three options: "Consent", "Do not consent", and "Not sure".

   • Make it a required question.

Here is what you will end up with:

8. Repeat this process for all the cases where you expect to need to acquire student consent for this class

🔗 Step 2 - Link Form(s) Responses to “Follower” Sheet(s) and then to a “Leader” Sheet

The second step in our process involves linking the responses from the Google Forms created in Step 1 to Google Sheets for easier management and analysis. We will create "follower" Sheets for each form to store individual responses and then consolidate these into a single "leader" Sheet. By linking each form’s responses to a dedicated "follower" Sheet, you ensure that all data is organized and accessible in a structured manner. Subsequently, the "leader" Sheet will aggregate these responses, allowing you to see at a glance which students have given consent and which have not. For instance, in my toy example, we end up with a Sheet that looks like this, dynamically filled based on student responses:

This method not only simplifies the process of tracking consent but also helps in maintaining a high level of organization and clarity, crucial for both compliance and communication purposes.

Let’s continue. Here are the sub-steps:

1. Create a "follower" Sheet

   • In the Google Form, click on the "Responses" tab.

   • Click the green Sheets icon to create a new Google Sheet (this will be your "follower" Sheet).

   • Name the "follower" Sheet appropriately (e.g., "Professor-Student Meetings Consent Form").

2. Repeat for each of the Forms you created in Step 1

The next step is to create a “leader” Sheet that gathers all of the responses from the “follower” Sheet.

3. Create a new “leader” Sheet from scratch (blank for now)

4. Go back to each of the Forms and link their Sheets to the “leader” Sheet

   • In the Form, click on the "Responses" tab.

   • Next to the green Sheets icon you used before, click on the three dots.

   • Click “Select destination for responses” and select the “leader” Sheet you just created

   • Do this for each of the Forms

The result will look something like this in your “leader” Sheet (visible at the bottom, with as many secondary “follower” Sheets next to the “leader” Sheet as you have Forms):

5. Format the “follower” Sheets in an organized and consistent manner

   • In the Sheet, order the columns to reflect the order of the questions, if they aren’t in the appropriate order already

   • Bold their names if you like

Here is how mine looks:

Now you need to connect the Sheets’ contents. You need a formula that draws the Form responses from the “follower” Sheet(s) into the “leader” Sheet. In particular, you need a formula that can handle the fact that students will respond to the consent Form(s) in an unpredictable order. However, you know who your students are — what their names are and what their email addresses are — and you can use this knowledge with a formula to “look” for their names when they appear in the “follower” Sheet(s). Here’s how…

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