Privacy

The short version

We collect your email address, the country you tell us, what you have finished, and anything you choose to rate or write. We use it to run the course and to make it better. We do not sell it and we do not advertise to you. You can have it all deleted by asking, and we do it within 30 days.

Who holds your information

Eric Green, a faculty member at the Duke Global Health Institute, makes and runs the mini-courses and is responsible for the information described here.

The site runs on Microsoft Azure infrastructure provided by the Duke Global Health Institute, so that is where your information is stored, and Duke staff who administer that infrastructure can reach it. It is not used for Duke's own purposes, and the mini-courses are not a Duke course — no credit, no badge.

You need to be at least 16 to enrol, so this is written for adults and we do not knowingly collect anything from children.

What we collect, and why

When you register

• Your email address. It is how you sign in and how we reach you.
• Your country. So we know where learners are and can report on reach. A country is all we ask, never an address.
• That you accepted the terms, with the date.

If you arrive from the Duke course

• If you enrol through the invitation page inside GLHLTH 702O, we use the email address already on your course account and record that you came from there. We use it to report how many students from that course used the series, and we may match the two records for that purpose. Your course account is untouched, and nothing you do here reaches it or changes it. If you register from anywhere else, no such link exists.

Later, and only if you want to

• A few questions about your background, asked after you finish your first lesson. Optional, skippable, and the course works identically if you never answer.

Before you have an account

• You can watch the lessons and take the end-of-lesson checks without registering. When you finish a step, or choose an answer in a check, we add one to a count — of how many times that step has been finished, or how many times that particular answer has been chosen. The second one tells us which wrong answers are tempting, which is how a confusing question gets found.
• No identifier is created or stored for either, nothing is set in your browser by us for this, and neither count can be linked back to you or to anything else you do. They are tallies, not records of a visit.
• If you tell us something is wrong with a step, we keep what you wrote so we can fix it. Without an account there is nothing attached to it but the step and the date, so please do not put anything in the box you would not want stored that way.

As you use the course

• What you have finished — which steps and lessons, and when.
• Your answers to the ungraded questions, so you can see them again and so we can find questions that are confusing.
• What you ask the AI tutor, and what it answered, kept against the lesson so the conversation is still there when you come back, and so we can see where the course confuses people and where the tutor gets it wrong. Your question and the lesson material are sent to OpenAI to generate the reply — see below.
• Ratings and any comment you write.
• Ordinary technical records — sign-in times, and what a web server normally logs.

We do not track you across other websites, and there is no advertising here.

Who else sees it

PairThink. Some exercises run on a separate system called PairThink, which is also ours. When you register here we create an account for you there too, so the exercise works without a second sign-up. It receives your email address, your name if you give one, and your enrolment. What you write in an exercise is stored there.

OpenAI. The AI tutor's answers are generated by OpenAI. When you ask it something, your question, the earlier turns of that conversation, and the lesson material go to OpenAI to produce the reply. It processes them on our instructions, does not use them to train its models, and gets nothing else about you — not your email address, not your name, not what else you have done here.

Our suppliers. Email delivery, hosting and video. They process data on our instructions and not for their own purposes. Videos are hosted on YouTube; watching an embedded video is a visit to YouTube, and their terms and cookies apply to that.

Nobody else. We do not sell your information and we do not share it for anyone else's purposes, except where the law requires it. Duke's role is the hosting described above and nothing more.

Your comments

A comment you write stays private unless you tick the box asking us to share it with other learners. When you do, you choose whether it appears with your first name and country or anonymously. You can withdraw that at any time and we will take it down.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Different things rest on different grounds, and it is worth being precise:

• To run the course — your email, your enrolment, and what you have finished. We need these to provide the thing you asked for.
• To improve it — which questions confuse people, where learners stop, what the tutor and the coach get wrong. This is our legitimate interest in making the course work, and you can object to it.
• Only with your agreement — the optional questions about your background, and showing your comment to other learners. Both are opt-in, both are skippable, and withdrawing either costs you nothing else.

Where it is held

Our servers are in the United States, so that is where your information is stored and processed. If you are in the UK or the EU, that means it leaves your country; where the law requires a safeguard for that, we rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

While your account is open. When you close it, or ask us to delete it, we remove your account and everything attached to it within 30 days — here and on PairThink.

Three things survive, and none of them is about you any more: anonymous counts, such as how many people finished a lesson; anything the law requires us to keep; and a problem report you sent about a step, kept with your name removed because it may describe something we still have to fix.

Your choices

• See what we hold about you.
• Correct anything wrong.
• Delete your account and your data, including the PairThink side. Ask us and we do it in both systems.
• Stop the email. We send very little: sign-in links and occasional course news. You can turn the news off and still sign in.

If you are in the UK or the EU you have further rights: to object to processing based on legitimate interests, to restrict it, to receive your data in a portable form, and to withdraw consent at any time. You can also complain to your data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office; in the EU, the regulator where you live. We would rather you came to us first, but you do not have to.

Cookies

We set what is needed to keep you signed in and to remember your place. No advertising cookies. The embedded YouTube player may set its own.

Changes

We may update this policy. The current version is always the one on this page, with the date it was last changed at the bottom.

If we change how we use your information — a new purpose, a new recipient, anything beyond what this policy describes — you will be asked to accept the new version the next time you sign in, before the change applies to you. For smaller changes, the dated version here is the notice.