Do you still remember GDPR?
Well certainly GDPR still remembers you:)
Six months after the general brouhaha of GDPR legislation coming into effect and it seems that heads have somewhat cooled down:
- The armageddon that many predicted has been largely avoided (or at least postponed until the European Union decides to unleash upon us the next privacy-related pandemic).
- Certainly, habits have changed and certain bad-taste marketing tactics have been receding. Overall our inboxes seem to be suffering less from spam and unwanted newsletters and offers.
- Users, especially in Europe, are now much more aware of privacy issues and much more thoughtful of the actions they take online and who they share their data with. From that point of view, GDPR has definitely produced some meaningful changes.
But it’s not all warm and fuzzy inside.
GDPR is here to stay and so are the headaches that it brings with it for owners of online businesses such as yourself.
We know very well how GDPR has made the life of school owners much more complicated. Marketing opt-ins, Cookie opt-ins, privacy and cookie policies, data deletion requests. What a headache. Not a day goes by without a confused school owner approaching us with a GDPR-related inquiry.
All of them are running ethical, evergreen online businesses and are trying hard to make it right by GDPR. But more often than not, they are at a loss about what is the right thing to do in each case.
Well, we are not a legal service and cannot provide all the answers regarding GDPR. But what we can certainly do is make your life as a school owner so much easier.
So what we bring to you today is the first and only GDPR-compliance Toolkit for online schools. That’s a cure for your GDPR-headaches and an industry first.
Over the past few months we’ve talked with dozens of school owners about the data privacy needs of their online businesses. And we have gone through more cases, best practices and legal documents than I care to remember.
What we have come up with is the GDPR Toolkit, a sensible and practical solution for GDPR. A comprehensive set of new capabilities and granular settings that is designed to help your school become and stay GDPR-compliant. Fully respecting the data privacy rights of your students, while making sure that compliance doesn’t scare potential customers away or otherwise ruin your marketing efforts.
So what we bring you today is the following:
- Marketing opt-ins for all your lead-capturing forms. Be it on the school sign-up form, on a course pre-launch form or on a newsletter sign-up form. All of them can now have an opt-in checkbox and text that you can fully customize. The opt-in data are stored in the platform so that you can have the digital evidence formally required by GDPR. And your users can always modify their settings through their profile.
- Cookie opt-ins for your school visitors. Instead of having to rely on third-party scripts and rag tag plugins, we bring you a full built-in solution. Now you can show your users a cookie opt-in that matches the theme of your school. Again, you can fully customize the wording of the opt-in forms and all the responses will be stored in the platform and can be controlled by the users. Along with that, we bring you a template for your school’s Cookie Policy that you can further customize to fit your needs.
- Email opt-ins for your users. Your users can now opt-in and -out of certain emails sent out via the platform, such as notifications about users’ activity and promotional emails.
- GDPR Data Requests for your users. Your users can now submit to you, through their profiles, Data Access and Data Deletion requests (aka, “Right to be Forgotten”), as dictated by GDPR. Then you can proceed and anonymize their accounts (stripping them of personally-identifiable data) or outright delete them.
- Granular Control. Most importantly this is not an all or nothing approach. As I said in the beginning, our GDPR Toolkit is sensible. So you can cherry-pick which GDPR-related capabilities you want to enable in your school. Perhaps you want to show marketing opt-ins and don’t care about cookies or vice versa.
And the absolute highlight?
Our GDPR-compliance Toolkit uses Geolocation so that you can select to which users it applies.
As you may know, if your business is based in the EU then you are obliged to comply with GDPR for all your students, regardless of where they are in the globe. But let’s say that yours is a US-based business that sells courses both to EU and US consumers. What you can do with our Toolkit is to choose to enable GDPR-related settings only for those users that are based in Europe. So your European users will get all their fair share of opt-ins but your non-EU users will be spared. Neat huh?
We are not here to judge or to be the enforcers of GDPR. We know that online businesses are complex and have to make hard choices every day. So we bring you the options to help you make the right choices for your business.
And I can guarantee you that the LearnWorlds GDPR Toolkit is the most comprehensive and practical solution for data privacy compliance amongst all course platforms.
In this article from our Help Center you may find all about the GDPR Toolkit and how you can use it to make your school compliant.
This is not a one-off. Here at LearnWorlds we respect GDPR and all the rules that make the internet a safe place for doing business online and we commit to always deliver solutions that will help school owners and professional trainers to run their online businesses in the most practical, efficient and profitable way possible.
And remember, LearnWorlds becomes better every single day.
Panos Siozos is the CEO and Co-Founder of LearnWorlds. He holds a PhD in Educational Technology and has worked extensively as a computer science educator, software engineer, IT manager and researcher in many EU funded research projects. Before following the startup route, he was working in the European Parliament as a policy adviser for research and innovation.
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