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Can I offer courses for young learners?
Can I offer courses for young learners?

What to know when offering courses for kids 13 and under.

Laurie Garcia avatar
Written by Laurie Garcia
Updated over a week ago

We take the online privacy policies for children seriously and have written terms into our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy that everyone must sign off on when creating an account. Here are the relevant parts:

You must be aged 13 years or older. If you are 13 or older but under the age of 18, review this agreement with your parent or legal guardian and obtain explicit permission to use Pathwright.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have collected the personal information of a child under 13, we will take steps to delete the information as soon as possible. Please contact us at secure@pathwright.com if you believe we have any information from or about a child under the age of 13.

However, parents are welcome to set up accounts for children under 13 using their own (the parent's) email address and a pseudonym. They should leave the optional profile picture blank (or use a neutral image).

Here are some practical steps to take if you expect to enroll younger learners in your courses:

  • Registration: When parents go to register for the first time, they will see the name, email, and password fields, and for children under 13, parents need to enter their own email and a pseudonym for the child. We do recommend using a pseudonym and not the child's real full name, since that is considered personal information. The pseudonym can be something fun, like a favorite character or animal.

  • Registering multiple children: Parents won't be able to create multiple accounts under the exact same address. However, gmail has a feature that lets you create multiple "sub-accounts" under the same account by using a plus sign or period in the address. A parent would need to either use separate accounts, or use separate gmail tags within their gmail account, for each child. For instance, myaddress+child1@gmail.com and myaddress+child2@gmail.com.

  • Discussions: We only display the user's first name and last initial in the discussions. You can disable community and discussions if you prefer, so learners won't see each other at all. Email addresses are not displayed to other learners.

  • Profile picture: The profile picture is not required; by default, it just shows a colored circle with initials. We don't prompt users to update their profile, so you can address that at the start of the course. Consider asking kids to upload a picture of a favorite animal or character, or take a picture of a self-portrait that they've drawn if they want to upload something.

There's no way to force parents to follow these steps, but we'd suggest using several layers to make sure that the instructions are clear and parents have "signed-off" on their child's use of the courses. Use as many of the following steps as you can.

  1. Tell parents in advance that if their child is under 13, they will need to create the account for the child.

  2. Set up the first step of each course with instructions for the parent. You can require parents to check a box saying that they have read and agree to your user terms as provided in that step.

  3. Make the first step available for public preview and include a link to the instructional step that parents can see even before they register. Place this link on the course "About" page where they will see it right before registering.

  4. Optionally consider adding your own privacy policy and opt-in checkbox to your sign-up screen.

  5. Use a custom message sent via Zapier to review the special instructions again.

  6. Optionally, invest in Message from Intercom or another tool which will allow you to send full-screen pop-up messages when someone lands on the page.

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