Our Services and Products

At SETA-ED, we help R&D teams expand their capacity and impact by building infrastructure, tools, protocols and policies that remove barriers to and amplify innovation. Technical infrastructure is only as secure as how people interact with it; to support this, we map legal and ethical protocols and practices into the technical infrastructures we build for clients. We do this through leveraging existing infrastructure or by building new infrastructure custom to the needs of the R&D portfolio.

Engineering and Technical Assistance

We build technical R&D infrastructures—providing secure storage and sharing of data, and for the development of analytics and application prototypes. Through the development of policies, processes and technical infrastructure, SETA-ED trains and enables highly secure data management and assurances for protecting sensitive datasets—allowing for prototypes to be tested on real data. By embedding national standards and assurances for information security (e.g., SOC 2, NIST), we significantly reduce the amount of security vetting and management needed across a portfolio of R&D projects.

A centralized R&D infrastructure is not just a data repository, but it is a controlled environment for prototype development, which promotes interoperability and streamlines rapid and iterative testing and evaluation. Shared infrastructure provides R&D portfolios opportunities to design modular technology, build components in-parallel, and test interoperability of prototypes within a standard environment. This also provides R&D portfolios the ability to monitor and oversee costs, particularly around highly-variable and intensive compute tasks and development. Centralized R&D infrastructure furthers portfolio level objectives by laying the foundation for program/project-level data and prototypes to be made available for integrative analytics; this type of higher-order hypothesis testing is what leads to transformative R&D.

  • A well-designed and centrally-managed R&D infrastructure for technology development allows for rapid, simplified and secured prototype development, as well as secure collection, storage, processing, and analysis of research data. By providing core resources, configured with security and privacy by design and standard development practices, common security mishaps are dramatically reduced. Technology prototypes incubated in a managed environment are much more secure during early-stage R&D and can spin-out into stand-alone products or services once they have matured and have a team staffed to manage security and privacy. Technology prototypes may transition out into open source software, commercial or otherwise licensed products, or government-furnished products.

  • Application security and privacy scans of third-party or custom-built applications assess the data collected through the application, scrutinizing both its usage and compliance with legal standards for children's privacy. These scans meticulously evaluate whether the application's data handling practices adhere to stringent privacy regulations designed to protect minors. By ensuring legal compliance, these evaluations play a crucial role in safeguarding children's privacy in digital environments.

  • SETA-ED helps teams interpret and implement the ‘research exception’ under FERPA for de-identifying education data. The critical method for viability rests on rigorous de-identification of student data, which is a notoriously difficult process to achieve. SETA-ED works with R&D teams to determine appropriate methods to move from pseudonymization to de-identification, and to ensure that de-identified data meets legal and ethical obligations for publishing data, ensuring viability for sustainable R&D efforts. The SETA-ED team supports R&D teams in implementing these technical methods for accomplishing de-identification at scale.

Legal and Ethical Frameworks and Expertise

Our team of privacy experts works closely with clients to ensure that project terms, including contracts and R&D grants, align with applicable privacy laws and regulations including IRB requirements and data sharing agreements. We also recognize that technical infrastructure is only as secure as the practices of the people who engage with the data, so our team crosswalks technical designs with legal policies, and creates practices to ensure legal and technical alignment. Our team continuously tracks and analyzes federal, state, and local legislative and regulatory landscapes to identify developments that may impact the R&D field, enabling us to provide comprehensive risk analysis and mitigation strategies for our clients. Additionally, state-wide privacy scans are conducted to determine state-specific laws and regulations, which are essential for vetting potential district, research, or vendor partnerships. These measures ensure that all engagements meet stringent privacy standards and support the integrity of our clients' projects.

SETA-ED's ethics attorneys assist project teams in navigating IRB applications when the projects may fall outside the scope of the IRB's expertise (e.g. UX/UI testing and product development). At the R&D portfolio or program level, SETA-ED formulates tailored ethics review processes, and ethics training capacity and expertise, including seminars and workshops that align with ethical research principles and supports engagement with Black, Latino and Indigenous students and students experiencing poverty.

  • R&D is inherently high risk, high reward, therefore portfolio managers need to identify risks, categorize them and ensure effective mitigation strategies are put into place. The Ethics and Risk Analysis Tool provides program and project teams support in navigating Institutional Review Board (IRB) applications and processes. Edtech projects, which may include Human Factors Research or UX/UI testing, commonly fall outside the scope of traditional IRBs; this Ethics and Risk Analysis Tool works to ensure ethical considerations for all types of projects are accounted for. Furthermore, this Ethics and Risk Analysis Tool is customizable to provide review processes tailored to the needs of the R&D portfolio or organization, such as promoting inclusion, diversity and fairness in your R&D efforts.

  • SETA-ED’s team of privacy and legal experts provides national and state-by-state reviews of legislative policies (current or upcoming) that may restrict R&D abilities–enabling risk to be adequately approximated and mitigation strategies to be put in place. The state-wide privacy scans connect state laws and regulations with legislative/policy realism due diligence when considering data governance requirements and to vet new district partners (i.e., polarizing political climates that could impact or limit R&D in certain states/districts).

  • Ethics and privacy seminars and workshops, tailored specifically for R&D in education, work to align ethical principles and support engagement with priority populations who have often been put at risk of harm or excluded from R&D, including Black, Latino, and Indigenous students and students experiencing poverty. This includes a concise but comprehensive course on Research Integrity and Ethics Training (to complement CITI Human Subjects training required for researchers operating under an IRB). This course covers topics specific to education and student/youth data collection that are not covered by CITI training.

Scientific and Inclusive R&D Support

Our team has supported hundreds of researchers, developers, students and educators to transform their bold goals into actionable R&D execution plans. SETA-ED provides portfolio, program and project leads scientific and engineering review, analysis, execution and evaluation support for R&D proposals, including cost realism, technical merit and scientific rigor. We support teams in generating open, inclusive and ethical R&D design and execution plans to embed inclusive research processes via transparent and replicable means, in a way that promotes district engagement and the transition of R&D applications into real-world education settings. 

We support education R&D initiatives to address the needs of students, especially Black, Latino and Indigenous students and students experiencing poverty. From training on the latest technology to new pedagogical and learning science methods, to developing measures of success, we help research and technology development produce impactful, equitable and useful outcomes to students, teachers and their communities.

  • Research and Development in the U.S. is held to a high level of ethical standards, particularly when the R&D includes ‘vulnerable populations’ such as children. SETA-ED provides protocols and practices for this high level of ethical rigor. A cornerstone of Portfolio Analysis is the R&D Ethics Committee (RDEC) Review. The purpose of RDEC Review is to provide a streamlined process for selecting and onboarding R&D teams, with the necessary due diligence to ensure that projects are aware of and meeting threshold requirements for ethical research and data protection. This process is aligned to easily accommodate both ‘traditional’ research (appropriate to standard IRBs) and ‘non-traditional’ research/R&D such as UX/UI and design-based research (which standard IRBs have had a difficult time understanding).

  • The New Start Pitch Template is a comprehensive tool that assists researchers and developers in generating a clear vision for their initiatives, registering hypotheses, and defining a project’s scope. This structured template ensures that every aspect of the project is planned and accounted for, from conceptualization to managing scope during execution. The New Start Pitch also guides researchers and developers in identifying measures of efficacy and success to enhance the precision and accountability of research and development efforts.

  • An extensive Guidebook on How to Conduct Ethical R&D is a distillation of years of learnings, with worked examples highlighting critical use cases encountered by AERDF to-date and how to manage these challenges. The first couple chapters cover the legal precedents for managed research data and projects in education. The rest of the book provides EdTech developers/engineers guidance for developing education products, built with privacy and security by design, and with equity at the center. The final chapter of the book emphasizes the benefits of open science practices, and a call to action to work to further the field of education R&D as a whole, to shift it from incremental R&D to transformative R&D.

Contact us to see how we can support your R&D initiatives.

Email
info@seta-ed.com