When you invite students to your classes on OpenProcessing, now you have two options about the student accounts.
Standard student accounts are like any other OpenProcessing user account. While being part of a class, they can also browse thousands of sketches on OpenProcessing to find inspiration and interact with the rest of the community. They can join code challenges, post comments, and create public sketches.
Restricted student accounts are FERPA and COPPA compliant student accounts, and if such compliance is required by your institution, you should use restricted student accounts.
They can browse OpenProcessing as usual but they can not interact with other users (thru commenting, liking sketches, or following users).
Their profiles and sketches will only be visible to their classmates and teachers. They will still be able to set their sketches private per sketch privacy settings, but they will not be able to set it "Public".
They can still share their sketches privately with others (such as parents) by creating a private URL or embedding their sketches on their websites.
They will not be able to upload a photo as a user thumbnail. Instead, they will be assigned an avatar that they can customize in the user profile settings.
OpenProcessing will not collect any Personally-Identifiable-Information (PII), such as names or emails, for these accounts.
Instead, students will be able to sign in using a username (that is different from their name or email) and password.
They will not receive any emails from OpenProcessing.
If your class is part of an institution subject to FERPA or COPPA regulations, you should use restricted student accounts.
Based on your selection for your class, your class invite link will direct students to create the appropriate student account.
Few Notes
Changing this setting will only apply to students joining your class after the change. Any students who already created an account as restricted or standard will not be effected by this change.
Restricted student account option is only available for private classes. If your class is set to be a public class for events such as a workshop or a hackaton, all student accounts will be Standard. You can set your class private/public under the class settings.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions regarding student account types.