About this project

About & methodology

The UMN Ed Tech Transparency Project is an independent, unofficial resource that helps faculty, students, staff, and community members understand the University of Minnesota's policies on AI and technology, its contracts with educational technology companies, and how those choices compare with peer universities. It is not produced or endorsed by the University of Minnesota.

Principles

• Every claim links to a source. Summaries here are starting points; the linked official document is always the authority.
• Absence is information. Where contract terms are not public, we say so — that gap is itself something the community should know.
• Plain language. Policies are summarized the way you'd explain them to a colleague, not the way they're written.

Verification levels

Each entry carries a verification badge:

• ✓ source verified — the claim is corroborated by multiple independent sources, and the cited link has been confirmed by the automated checker.
• partially verified — the claim is corroborated by multiple independent sources (official UMN pages, news coverage, public records), but we have not yet re-confirmed every detail against the live primary document.
• unverified — a single source, a disputed detail, or an inference. Treat with caution.

Dollar figures for contracts come from public Board of Regents docket summaries and news reporting, not from the contracts themselves, which UMN does not publish. Full contract documents can be requested under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act ↗.

How the weekly policy check works

A scheduled job runs once a week. It fetches each page on our watchlist of official UMN policy and AI-guidance pages, reduces each page to its text content, and compares it against the previously stored snapshot. If a page changed, the job records an entry in the public change log with the date and a link to the page, and updates the "last checked" timestamp shown on the Policies page. The watchlist, snapshots, and checker code are all in this site's public repository, so the monitoring itself is auditable.

The checker detects that a page changed, not whether the change matters — a changed timestamp might be a typo fix or a major policy revision. Entries in the change log are prompts to go read the page, not summaries of what changed.

What this site is not

• Not legal advice. If you face an academic integrity allegation or a data-privacy issue, consult the official offices or an advocate.
• Not a complete inventory. UMN uses hundreds of software tools; this site covers the major systems that affect teaching, learning, and personal data.
• Not frozen. University AI policy is changing fast; check the linked sources for anything high-stakes.

Corrections

Found an error or a missing source? Open an issue in the site's repository or contact the maintainer. Corrections are tracked publicly in the repository history.