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.

How this site was made

This site was researched, written, and built using Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent — under the direction of a human maintainer, who chose every research question, set the verification standards, reviewed the findings, and decides what is published. The AI did the labor: searching the web and the indexed full text of public archives (such as UMN's Digital Conservancy and Board of Regents materials), drafting the plain-language summaries, assembling every citation, and building the site's search, monitoring, and link-checking systems. The judgment about what to investigate and what to publish is human.

Because AI research can make mistakes, the site is designed so you never have to take its word for anything:

• Every factual statement links to its source. The linked document is the authority; the summary is a starting point.
• Verification badges say exactly how much checking a claim has had — see the levels below. Only claims a human has double-checked carry the ✓ badge.
• Everything is auditable. The complete code, data, research notes, and edit history are public in the site's GitHub repository ↗, along with the automated weekly policy and link checks.

Verification levels

Each entry carries a verification badge:

• ✓ human verified — a human has double-checked this claim against the linked source.
• partially verified — the claim was corroborated across multiple independent sources (official UMN pages, news coverage, public records) during AI-assisted research, but has not yet been double-checked by a human.
• 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.

Out of respect for UMN Libraries' request that automated traffic avoid their archive systems, the automated checks never probe links to the Digital Conservancy, UMedia, or other Libraries archive sites — those citations are verified by humans only.

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 made publicly and tracked in the repository history.