Data Protection and Confidentiality

Secure and Confidential Surveys

All OU survey results are stored securely, are only available to authorised individuals to use for analysis and reporting purposes and are handled in compliance with Data Protection legislation and OU best practice.

We treat all individual responses to our surveys in confidence so we are unable to pass on any queries you raise on your completed survey. If you require an individual response to any issues you have about any aspect of your module, it is important to raise them with your support team accessed by using the contact information available from your StudentHome Help Centre.

You may be interested to know:

• We only use your personal identifier to analyse data by group characteristics, such as age bands or gender - for example to inform our widening access and participation strategy.  
• Your survey answers and comments will never be used in a way that can identify you individually.
• Your survey answers and comments are not used in the assessment of your studies.

On the SEaM survey:

• Comments you make about your module experience are made available to the module team, qualification or programme teams, who are advised about the conditions of use of this information.
• Anonymised quotes from your comments may be used to illustrate the survey findings in internal reports and external publications. However, if you would rather your comments were not used in this way please tick the box on the final page of the questionnaire or contact us.

Follow-up research 

Survey results can sometimes highlight areas where we would like to know more. This can be because the responses from a particular group of students were unusual in some way, or because we would like to explore your answers in more detail. We may email you to invite you to take part in a follow-up study but participation is completely optional. 

Image credit: Chris Potter via Flickr, shared under Creative Commons licence.