Evaluating and Buying Campus AI: HECVAT 4, FERPA Contract Terms and Exit Rights

About this course

An ai procurement checklist for a campus has to do more than a security questionnaire did in 2019: the product learns from what you feed it, its price moves with usage, and the hardest question is what you keep if you leave. This course walks the campus AI acquisition cycle in the order it happens: intake and triage, the HECVAT 4 questionnaire and its AI tab, evidence beyond attestations, the FERPA school-official conditions written into the contract, the no-training clause, pricing transparency, exit rights borrowed from the federal government's own model clauses, and a 90-day return-on-investment gate. You will practice on a sample vendor response and contract, use an AI agent to build a gap register and check its work by hand, and run an exit drill on a live sample deployment. Why now: only 29 percent of campus technology officers surveyed in 2026 said AI investments met return-on-investment expectations, and that spring the Department of Education asked a major learning-platform vendor for exactly the documents this course teaches you to request before signing.

What you will be able to do

1. Triage any proposed AI purchase into a due-diligence tier and route it through an intake gate that permits no exception until a contract is in place.
2. Read a completed HECVAT 4 workbook, including the AI tab, and classify each answer as acceptable, conditional or disqualifying against a written standard.
3. Request and evaluate the four categories of evidence that the Department of Education itself requested from a vendor in May 2026, and name which items a SOC 2 Type II report does and does not cover.
4. Map a proposed AI data flow through the three FERPA school-official conditions in 34 CFR 99.31 and identify the contract terms that make each condition true.
5. Draft a no-training clause, a pricing-transparency clause and an exit-rights clause using the federal M-25-22 model language as a starting point, adapted to a campus contract.
6. Run an exit drill on a deployed agent (export data, audit log and cost history) and score the deployment on a 90-day ROI gate.

Who this course is for

Roles: CIOs and deputy CIOs, CISOs and security analysts who review vendor questionnaires, procurement and contracts officers, general counsel and privacy officers, and the functional owners (registrar, advising, enrollment, IT service desk) who sponsor an AI purchase and will live with the contract.

Institutions: any institution that buys or licenses AI-enabled software: public and private four-year institutions, community colleges, and system offices that negotiate on behalf of campuses. State procurement rules vary; the course teaches the campus-side discipline that sits inside whatever process your state or system requires.

Before you start: familiarity with your institution's existing technology purchase process and with the basics of FERPA. No technical or legal training is required. Labs use sample vendor answers and a sample contract, so no live vendor material is needed.

Format

• Estimated time: 10 to 12 hours.
• Level: intermediate; practitioner, not technical or legal.
• Hands-on: two labs (a questionnaire-review agent on a sample HECVAT AI tab and a sample contract; an exit drill on a live sample agent) plus four templates you keep: the intake and triage form, the AI-tab scoring standard, the FERPA data-flow map, and the ROI gate scorecard.
• Structure: 4 sections, each ending in an AI conversation assessment, then a capstone assessment.

Self-paced. Every lesson is taught by an AI tutor that opens with a short story and works through one idea and one question at a time. Each section ends with an AI conversation assessment, and the course closes with a capstone assessment. Section assessments count for 60% and the capstone for 40%; 70% passes. There are no multiple-choice quizzes.

Currency of this course

Last verified 2026-09-28