Before you upload fifteen years of material to anyone, including us, there are six questions to ask. Each has a good answer that fits in a sentence. A vendor who can't give it in a sentence is telling you something.
The six questions
| Question | A good answer sounds like | A vague answer means |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns what I upload? | "You do. We claim no rights to it or anything derived from it. It's in the agreement." | The agreement gives them a licence you haven't read. |
| Could another centre see it? | "No. Your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, and your material is never shared with or reused for anyone else." | A promise with nothing behind it in the agreement. |
| Do you train on it? | "No. Not on your material, not on your students' answers, not anonymised." | Anonymised training, at least, is happening. |
| Where is it hosted? | A country, named. | They don't know, or it's somewhere the privacy law is different. |
| What happens if I leave? | "Access ends, we delete our copies within a stated period and confirm in writing, and you still hold your own originals." | Nobody has thought about it, or the answer is "contact support". |
| Will you contact my parents? | "Never. We hold their details only to send the reports you approve, from your address." | Your parents are on a list somewhere. |
The rest of this post is what's behind each row and why the vague version costs you.
Ownership and isolation
The honest answer to the first question is "you do", and it should be followed by "and anything derived from it". Derived matters. A converted practice set, a worked solution built from your notes, a report generated from your students' work: if the vendor owns those, they own the version of your material that's actually useful, and you own a folder of PDFs.
Look for the words "no rights", "never reuse", "never redistribute", and look for them in the agreement, not the brochure. Ours are on the security and ownership page and in the contract. If a vendor's answer is "of course it's yours" with nothing in writing, the agreement probably says otherwise.
The second question is about where the line between you and the vendor's other customers sits. Every platform will say another centre can't see your material. What matters is what's behind the sentence: whether your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, where it's hosted, and whether the vendor commits in writing to never sharing your material with, or reusing it for, anyone else.
Ours is: your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, and your material is never shared with or reused for anyone else. Ask any vendor for their version in the same plain words, then find it in the agreement. "Enterprise-grade isolation" isn't an answer. A sentence you can hold them to is.
Training and hosting
The training question is the one to push on, because the vague answer has a specific shape: "we don't train on customer data" followed, a paragraph later, by "aggregated and anonymised data may be used to improve the service".
Anonymised training on your material is still training on your material. Your practice papers, your sequence, your method, going into a model that serves the centre down the road. The good answer has three parts: not on your material, not on your students' answers, not in anonymised form. And a fourth, which is that the vendor makes the same commitment in its own contracts with the providers it uses. If they can't speak for their suppliers, they can't speak for the answer.
Hosting is simpler. A country. That's the answer. It decides which privacy law applies to your students' and parents' details and how quickly a request for data can be answered. For a centre in Australia or New Zealand, "Australia" is a clean answer: inside the Australian privacy regime, inside a working-day timezone. A vendor who has to check, or who says "the cloud", hasn't thought about it, and you'll be the one explaining it to a parent.
Leaving, and your parents
The good answer to "what happens if I leave" has two halves. First, possession: who ends up holding the only good copy of your material. Second, deletion: the vendor removes its copies within a stated period and confirms it in writing.
Possession is the half most owners skip past. The fear behind the question is a supplier sitting on fifteen years of your worksheets, and the fix people reach for is export on demand, a button that pulls everything back out. It's a reasonable ask of a platform that took your only copy. It's the wrong first question. The better one is whether the vendor needs you to hand over anything you won't still have afterwards. Ask it plainly. If you upload copies and your drive and your drawer are untouched, there is nothing to hold hostage, and the button matters a great deal less than it sounds like it should.
Ours is worth saying plainly, including the part that costs us a sale now and then. The platform is a hosted service and nothing downloads out of it, for a student or for an owner. That's the same rule that stops a student saving your worksheets and walking off with them, and we don't get to have it both ways. What you keep is what you always had: your own material, which you never gave up. When you leave, access ends and we delete our copies within 30 days and confirm it in writing.
The last question is about the business itself. A vendor who holds your parents' email addresses holds the one list you can't afford to share. The good answer is "never", and it has a mechanism behind it: the reports go out from your address, with your logo, and the vendor holds parent details for no other purpose. Replies land in your inbox. Your parents never see the vendor's name. If a vendor's platform sends anything to a parent under its own brand, or offers the parent an app, a login or a newsletter, then it's building a relationship with your customer, and one day it may sell to them directly.
What a good conversation looks like
Six questions, six sentences, all in the agreement. The FAQ has our answers to each, in the words we'd use across a table. If a vendor's answers are longer than ours and less specific, that's the information.
None of this is legal advice. It's a checklist for a conversation you should have before you hand over the drive, and your adviser should read whatever agreement comes out of it.
What to do this week
Write the six questions on one page. Ask them of any platform you're talking to, including us, and write the answers beside them in the vendor's own words. Then find each answer in the agreement. Where you can't, ask why.