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Privacy Statement
Last updated: 30 September 2026
1. Who We Are and Who This Policy Covers
Effective date: 30 September 2026
Blended Teaching is a course-materials platform for higher education instructors and students, including interactive digital textbooks, assessments and paper-exam grading. It is operated by Ascension Education, Inc. (d/b/a Blended Teaching), a Delaware corporation with a principal place of business at 22 Trammell St SW B, Marietta, GA 30064.
This Privacy Policy applies to two types of users:
Student Users: Students aged 18 or older who register for and use the platform through their university's learning management system (LMS), such as Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace (D2L) or Moodle.
Instructor Users: Faculty, professors, and other educational professionals who register for and use the platform to create and deliver course content.
By creating an account and using our Services, you agree to the practices described in this Privacy Policy. Students and Instructors are also subject to their respective Terms of Service, which incorporate this Policy by reference.
When a student uses Blended Teaching through their institution, we process the student's education records on the institution's behalf as a school official (Section 3.4). If an institution has a written agreement with us, such as a data protection agreement, that agreement takes precedence over this Policy wherever the two differ.
2. Information We Collect
The information we collect, or may have collected about customers, prospects, website users, and through the use of our products and services, generally falls into the following categories:
2.1. Information You Provide Directly
We collect information you provide when you create an account or use the Services, including:
Account registration data: name, email address, institution, and, for users who sign in directly rather than through their LMS, a password. Our sign-in service, Supabase Auth, stores passwords only as salted hashes, in the United States.
Profile information: academic role, course information, and institutional affiliation.
Content you upload or submit: for Instructors, this includes course materials, videos, quiz questions, documents, and other educational content; for Students, this includes quiz and assignment responses, written answers, and any content submitted through the platform. Instructors may also upload scans of students' handwritten paper quizzes and exams for grading.
Communications: any messages, support requests, or feedback you send to us, including through the Intercom support chat in the student and instructor apps, where Intercom's AI support agent (Fin) may answer (Section 3.5).
2.2. Information Collected Automatically
When you use the Services, we automatically collect:
Usage and interaction data: pages visited, features used, quiz attempts, video watch time, and navigation patterns.
Analytics and session recordings: in our apps we use PostHog, which stores data in the United States, to measure how the platform is used. PostHog may also record sessions (for example clicks, scrolling and page changes) so that we can find and fix problems. What you type into form fields is masked in these recordings.
Device and technical data: browser type, operating system, IP address, and device identifiers.
Log data: timestamps, referring URLs, and session data.
Cookies and similar technologies: as described in Section 8 below.
2.3. Information from Third Parties
When you use Blended Teaching through your institution's learning management system (LMS), such as Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace or Moodle, the LMS sends us your name, email address, LMS user ID, role and course membership using the LTI 1.3 standard. With the institution's permission, we can also read the course roster (the names and email addresses of enrolled students) and send grades back to the LMS gradebook. Your institution's LMS settings control what is shared.
3. How We Use Your Information
3.1. To Provide and Improve the Services
We use your information to: Create and manage your account and provide access to the platform. Deliver educational content, videos, and interactive features. Process quiz and exam responses, help instructors grade them, display performance data and, when the instructor chooses, send grades to the LMS. Facilitate integration with learning management systems. Provide customer support and respond to inquiries. Ensure the security and integrity of the platform.
3.2. We Do Not Train AI Models on Your Data
We never train or fine-tune any AI model on customer data, including your data. This applies to student data and to instructor content, whether it is identifiable or de-identified. Our AI model providers do not train their models on it either (see Section 3.5).
Under the licence in the Instructor Terms of Service, we may use instructor-uploaded materials as source material to build concept databases and question banks from which we generate new course content. This is not AI model training. We will not reproduce, publish or distribute an instructor's materials to third parties in their original or substantially similar form.
3.3. Instructor-Uploaded Content and Copyright
When Instructors upload content to the platform, including course materials, documents, or other materials that may incorporate third-party copyrighted works: Instructors represent and warrant that they have the necessary rights, licenses, or permissions to upload and use such content on the platform. Blended Teaching does not use uploaded content, including third-party copyrighted material, to train AI models. Instructors grant Blended Teaching a license to host, display, and deliver such content to students within the platform, and a separate license to use such content as source material to build our content databases, in each case as described in the Instructor Terms of Service. Blended Teaching will not reproduce or distribute Instructor-uploaded content to third parties in its original or substantially similar form.
3.4. FERPA Compliance
Blended Teaching recognizes that User Data may include personally identifiable information from education records subject to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act ("FERPA"). We operate as a "School Official" with a "legitimate educational interest" as defined under FERPA.
In this capacity, we: Use student education record data only for the purpose of providing the Services. Do not use student education records to train AI models, in identifiable or de-identified form. Share student education records with AI providers only to deliver the instructor features described in Section 3.5, and with our other service providers only to operate the Services, in each case under our direct control. Do not sell student personally identifiable information to third parties. Do not use student personally identifiable information for targeted advertising. Do not disclose student personally identifiable information to unauthorized third parties without consent or a lawful FERPA exception. Maintain appropriate technical and organizational safeguards for student education records.
3.5. AI Features and What They Send to AI Providers
Students: our instructional features for students (the course app opened from the LMS, and the Library) contain no generative AI. Nothing a student does in them is sent to an AI provider at that time. Student work can reach an AI provider only if an instructor later uses one of the instructor features below. The only AI that students use directly is Intercom's AI support agent (Fin) in the support chat, described next.
Support chat: students and instructors can receive answers from Intercom's AI support agent (Fin) in the in-app support chat. The messages a user types into the chat, and the name and email address attached to the conversation, are processed by Intercom using generative AI to answer the question. Intercom hosts this data in the United States.
Instructors: some instructor features use AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Student names and emails held in our records are replaced with opaque references before model calls; what a student writes or scans (answers, handwriting images) is sent as written for grading. When an instructor uses one of these features, the data listed below is sent:
Assisted grading of written answers: the student's written answer, or for paper exams the scanned image of the handwritten answer, together with the question and the marking guidance.
Paper quiz and exam reading: image crops of the handwritten name and answers on each scanned paper are sent to Google Cloud Vision (text recognition) to match the paper to the right student and read the answers.
Instructor analytics assistant: to answer an instructor's question about their class, the assistant can look up grades and other course data and include them in its request to the AI provider. It cannot read student names or email addresses; it refers to students by opaque references. The assistant can read data but cannot change it.
Content and question generation, course import, slides and course insights: the instructor's own course materials and aggregated class statistics that do not identify students.
AI output is a suggestion for the instructor to review.
AI providers process this data only to return a result to the feature that requested it. Model providers do not use our data for training and do not store it for reuse; any provider retention is limited to short-term abuse monitoring.
4. AI Providers and Third-Party Subprocessors
4.1. AI Providers
Some instructor features are powered by third-party AI providers. We use them under their commercial API terms, which: do not permit them to use our data to train their models; require them to maintain appropriate security measures; and limit their use of the data to providing the service to us.
Our current AI providers are OpenAI (GPT models and embeddings) and Anthropic (Claude models).
4.2. Other Service Providers (Subprocessors)
We use the following service providers to operate the platform. Each one processes personal information only to provide its service to us. The same list, with the data each provider receives, is published at https://www.blended-teaching.com/subprocessors.
Amazon Web Services: application servers, search, file storage and the LMS connection service. United States (us-east-1).
Supabase: main database and sign-in (Supabase Auth, since 30 September 2026). United States (us-east-1).
Vercel: hosting for our web apps. United States.
Upstash: temporary data cache.
OpenAI and Anthropic: instructor AI features (Section 3.5).
Google Cloud Vision: text recognition for scanned paper quizzes and exams (image crops of handwritten names and answers; Section 3.5).
Auphonic: audio clean-up of lecture narration that instructors record. Receives no student data.
PostHog: product analytics, including session recording (Section 2.2). United States.
Sentry: error monitoring.
Intercom: in-app support chat in the student and instructor apps, including Intercom's AI support agent (Fin), which uses generative AI to answer support messages from students and instructors (Section 3.5). United States.
SendGrid (Twilio): account and service email.
Mux: video hosting, streaming and playback analytics.
Stripe: payments for student purchases, through Stripe-hosted checkout; card details are entered only on Stripe's pages.
Contentful: publishing course content. Holds no student data.
Internal tools (Slack, Linear, GitHub and Google Workspace): team messaging, issue tracking, source code and staff email. We use them for our own work, not to process student data.
All such providers are required by contract to: (a) process your data only on our instructions; (b) maintain appropriate security measures; and (c) not use your data for their own purposes. We will update this list when we add or replace a provider.
4.3. Where Your Data Is Stored
All customer data is stored in the United States. Our main systems, database and sign-in service run in Amazon Web Services and Supabase in the us-east-1 region (Northern Virginia), and database backups stay in the United States. Our web apps are hosted by Vercel in the United States and delivered through Vercel's global network. Since 30 September 2026, sign-in has been handled by Supabase Auth in the same US region.
5. How We Share Your Information
We do not sell your personal information. We may share your information only in the following circumstances: With AI providers and service providers as described in Sections 3.5 and 4. With your educational institution, where required to facilitate access to or use of the Services. To comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request. To protect the rights, property, or safety of Blended Teaching, our users, or others. In connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. With your consent, for purposes not described in this Policy.
6. Data Retention
We retain your personal information for as long as necessary to provide the Services and as required by applicable law. Specifically: account data and student records are kept while the institution's agreement with us (or, for a user who signs up directly, the account) is in effect, and then for up to 60 days, during which the institution or instructor can export them; we then delete them. Student education records subject to FERPA will be deleted or returned within 30 days of the institution's written request, subject to any legal retention requirements. Database backups are kept for 7 days and then overwritten; we restore them only to recover from a disaster. We may keep de-identified data only as aggregate statistics that cannot identify any individual or institution, such as the number of quizzes taken in a term. We never use them to train AI models. Instructor-uploaded content will be retained for the duration of the instructor's account and deleted within 60 days after the account closes. Data sent to AI providers is kept by them only as described in Section 3.5.
You may request deletion of your personal data at any time by contacting us at [email protected]. We will respond within 30 days and will delete or de-identify the data unless the law requires us to keep it. Where the data is part of an institution's education records, we will act on the institution's instructions.
7. Your Rights and Choices
7.1. Rights Under FERPA
If you are a student, you have the right to: Inspect and review your education records maintained by us. Request amendment of education records you believe are inaccurate or misleading. Control disclosure of personally identifiable information from your education records, with limited exceptions. To exercise these rights, contact your institution or email us at [email protected].
7.2. AI Features
We never train AI models on your data, so there is no AI training to opt out of. Section 3.5 explains what each AI feature does and what it sends, and https://www.blended-teaching.com/ai explains how we use AI in plain terms.
7.3. California Residents (CCPA)
If you are a California resident, you have the right to: Know what personal information we collect, use, disclose, and sell. Request deletion of your personal information. Opt out of the sale of your personal information (we do not sell personal information). Non-discrimination for exercising your privacy rights.
7.4. Access, Correction, and Deletion
All users may request access to, correction of, or deletion of their personal information by contacting us at [email protected]. We will respond to all requests within 30 days.
8. Cookies and Tracking Technologies
We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to operate and improve the platform. These include: Strictly necessary cookies: Required for the platform to function, including sign-in (Supabase Auth) and session management. Performance and analytics cookies: PostHog uses cookies and similar browser storage to measure how the platform is used and to record sessions (Section 2.2). Support chat: Intercom uses cookies so that your support conversation continues from page to page. Functional cookies: Remember your preferences and settings.
You can control cookie settings through your browser. Disabling certain cookies may affect the functionality of the platform. We do not use cookies for targeted advertising. Our Cookie Policy at https://www.blended-teaching.com/cookies gives more detail.
9. Data Security
We employ commercially reasonable security measures to protect your personal information, including: Encryption of data in transit (TLS 1.2 or higher) and at rest (AES-256). Access controls, including multi-factor authentication for all staff access to our infrastructure consoles. Independent penetration testing (most recently June 2026, with a retest in July 2026) and continuous monitoring and alerting on our cloud systems. Security and data protection terms with our service providers. Our security page at https://www.blended-teaching.com/security gives more detail.
If we confirm a security breach that affects personal information, we will notify the affected institutions without undue delay and in any event no later than 72 hours after confirming it. We will notify affected individuals and regulators as required by law and by our agreements with institutions.
No data transmission over the internet is completely secure. While we use commercially reasonable measures, we cannot guarantee absolute security.
10. Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. For routine changes, we will update the Effective Date and notify you via a notice on our website.
For material changes, including any decision to use data to train AI models, any new feature that sends identifiable student data to an AI provider, any new categories of data collected, or any new AI Providers, we will: Provide at least 30 days' prior notice via email to your registered email address. Post a prominent notice on our website and within your account dashboard. Where required by applicable law, obtain your affirmative re-consent before the change takes effect.
11. Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, wish to exercise your rights, or have concerns about how we handle your data, please contact us:
Privacy questions, deletion requests and student requests: [email protected]
Privacy Officer and data protection officer: Phil Laney, Chief Executive Officer, [email protected]
Security questions and vulnerability reports: [email protected] (Security Officer: Andrew Snead, Chief Technology Officer)
Postal address: Blended Teaching, Attn: Privacy, 22 Trammell St SW B, Marietta, GA 30064
We aim to respond to all privacy inquiries within 30 days.