Building Trust in a Computer Science Professional Development Passport for K-12 Teachers

The Computer Science (CS) Professional Development (PD) Passport Alliance has created an addition to the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) member platform that provides the capability for CSTA members to track their CS PD-related activities in one convenient place. As part of our research effort supporting the platform development, one of our research questions was: Among teachers, what features or practices are associated with trusting in software that contains professional personally identifiable information (PII)? We conducted an exploratory mixed methods study (teacher interviews n = 17, teacher survey n = 495, program evaluation survey n = 494) to determine what enables trust in software that stores professionally identifiable information and which features were most important to teachers future use of the platform. We provide recommendations for the project implementation team (such as adding multi-factor authentication to the platform) to mitigate risks of a data breach (which our survey indicated would impact 98% of the respondents' perceptions).