What is a Yard?
A Yard is a a fully supported social learning community. To learn more about establishing a Yard for your institution, please contact us at 973.494.8041 or info@connectyard.com.

What are the benefits of subscribing to the ConnectYard?
Subscribing to ConnectYard offers the following benefits:

• Your institution's own private social learning community
• QuickConnect LMS Widget for every course, department and student organization
• Searchable knowledge base and trending of discussion topics
• No banner advertising to your social learning community
• No technical skills or IT infrastructure required
• Less than a week lead time to begin implementation

How is ConnectYard licensed?
ConnectYard is licensed to institutions and departments as an annual subscription-based service. Please contact a ConnectYard sales representative for pricing information at 973.494.8041 or sales@connectyard.com.

How are we able to ensure that only our students are assigned to our license?
Access to your institution's community is limited via email verification. Furthermore, your community will be managed by your designated administrator(s).

Can students and instructors connect across Yards?
Although each institution subscribing to ConnectYard has its own social learning community, students and instructors have the option of forming connections with other teachers and learners within the larger ConnectYard community. This is especially helpful for collaborative research projects that span multiple institutions.

What is the lead time required for our institution to establish a social learning community on ConnectYard?
Depending on your institution's requirements, we can have your Yard up and running in less than a week.

Is ConnectYard a replacement for our learning management system or portal?
No. ConnectYard extends the communication capabilities of your existing LMS and portal solutions by allowing online discussions to take place using the student's and instructor's technology of choice, including Facebook, Twitter, text messsaging and email, without the need to login to those systems.

Is Facebook or Twitter required in order to use ConnectYard?
No. Users have the option of accessing ConnectYard with or without a social networking account like Facebook or Twitter.

If I join ConnectYard using Facebook, will my wall, photos, etc. be shared with other students and instructors?
No. One of the benefits of using ConnectYard is that it allows you to network with other students and instructors without having to "friend" them and reveal your profile wall, photos, notes and boxes. In fact, the only information that is publicly shared from your Facebook profile is your name, school, concentration and graduation year.

What is the difference between using ConnectYard and Facebook Groups?
While Facebook Groups require both students and instructors to have a Facebook account in order to participate, ConnectYard allows participants to interact socially online without "friending" each other and revealing overly personal information; an action that is required in order to invite others to a Facebook group. In addition, ConnectYard extends the communication possibilities beyond just Facebook, by incorporating messages from Twitter, mobile phones and even traditional email into one single, cohesive discussion that can be easily shared and searched by students and instructors alike.

Does ConnectYard infringe on The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)?
When your institution acquires a subscription license, a representative agrees to the ASP Hosted Software License Agreement. This helps ensure FERPA compliance under that agreement and student data is protected as in any other hosted service agreement.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99) is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all institutions that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education. For more information on FERPA please see - http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html

FERPA is designed to protect students by limiting the University with regard to information it can share about students. When a school makes ConnectYard available, access to student information is only granted to ConnectYard for those students that have accepted ConnectYard's terms and conditions, absolving the University from any liability related to FERPA. When a student installs ConnectYard, the student, independent of the University, chooses to grant ConnectYard access to his or her own educational information for the purpose of displaying that information to the student only, where the student chooses (in this case Facebook). Students have the right to share their own information with whomever they choose. ConnectYard is 100% transparent about what types of student information it accesses on behalf of its users.

Under FERPA institutions are allowed to disclose directory information at their discretion. Directory information includes: student first and last name, email address, phone number, physical address, date of birth, photograph, major field of study, dates of attendance, grade level, and others.

How does ConnectYard protect secure information?
ConnectYard recognizes the trust placed in us as a 3rd party application and does all in its power to protect the information entrusted to us. By adopting industry standard security protocols ConnectYard provides a safe and secure environment for students to interact, collaborate, and stay up-to-date on University events and services. Please review our Privacy Policy for more information.

Where is ConnectYard hosted?
ConnectYard is hosted at Joyent, the official hosting environment for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google OpenSocial and numerous other high volume social networking applications. ConnectYard's Web/application and database tiers are powered by Sun Solaris running on Dell Poweredge 2950 dual quad-core servers with Sun Fire X4500 (aka "Thumper") storage devices capable of delivering sustained throughput of >2GB/second. ConnectYard uses E-Series routers and switches from Force 10 for maximum throughput, redundancy and reliability along with F5 Networks BIG-IP load balancers to provide the stunning performance across multiple servers and carrier-grade data centers in Emeryville, CA, Andover, MA, and San Diego, CA.