How College Onramps collects, uses, and protects information about families and students.
Active Learning Sciences, Inc. ("ALS," "we") operates College Onramps at collegeonramps.org, and delivers the program itself through the Alias learning platform at alias.activelearningsciences.com. This notice explains what information we collect across both, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what you can do about it.
College Onramps is a curriculum, technology, and support program that families use as part of a parent-directed home-education program. We are not a school. We do not receive student records from a school district, so FERPA does not govern the information described here. If we ever contract directly with a school or district, a separate agreement and notice will apply.
This notice applies to visitors to our website, parents and guardians who inquire about or purchase the program, and enrolled students. Where a student is under 18, we treat the parent or guardian who holds the account as the person who exercises privacy rights on the student's behalf, except where law gives the student their own rights.
Students must be at least 15 to enroll. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information, contact us at info@collegeonramps.org and we will delete it.
When you inquire. Our inquiry forms ask for the parent's first and last name, an email address, the student's first name, the student's current grade, and anything you choose to write in the optional message field. We use this to respond to you and to follow up about the program.
When you take a quiz. Our fit-assessment quiz and our student-archetype quiz both ask for a first name and email address so we can send you your result, along with your quiz answers and whether you'd like to receive other updates.
When you enroll. Account credentials, student date of birth, mailing address, state and district of residence, prior schooling, and billing contact. We collect date of birth and state because age and residency affect GED eligibility and compulsory-attendance obligations.
Coursework and platform activity. When a student works in the Alias Learning Engine we record their responses, written work, submitted projects, assessment results, progress against learning objectives, time spent, and the content of tutoring conversations with the system.
Proctored examinations. Course final exams are proctored using the student's webcam. Video is recorded, reviewed first by an automated system and escalated to a person if it flags something, and stored for two weeks. Students and parents are told before an exam that proctoring will occur.
Mentor sessions. Mentors keep notes on scheduling, goals, progress, and plans agreed with the student.
Social Adventures Program. We log which planned activities a student completes and when. Students' notes, photos, written submissions, or other assignments are viewed only by mentors and administrators.
We use the information to deliver the program: to run and personalize coursework, to let mentors support the student, to keep parents informed of progress, to administer exams and verify academic honesty, to handle billing, to respond to questions, to secure the platform, and to meet legal obligations.
We use aggregated or de-identified information to improve our courses and measure how well the program works. This information cannot reasonably be linked back to a student.
Artificial intelligence and third-party AI providers. The Alias Learning Engine uses third-party AI providers to deliver instruction and assessment, primarily Anthropic's Claude models, along with Google's Gemini models for some functions. We use paid, business-tier API access for these providers, not their free consumer tiers. The specific provider depends on the configuration of the course or activity.
When a student interacts with Alias, we send the applicable provider the content of the conversation, the student's first name, any interests the student has chosen to share for personalization, and the instructional materials tied to the activity. We do not send the student's email address, account credentials, or grade records to an AI provider.
Our AI providers process this under their commercial terms of service, which incorporate a Data Processing Addendum. Submitted content is not used to train the underlying models under either provider's paid tier, and is retained only for a limited period — typically up to 30 days — for abuse monitoring, safety, and legal compliance.
Mentors and administrators may review a student's conversation transcripts to support their learning. Automated scoring may identify gaps and recommend what a student works on next, but a student's completion of the program is not decided by an automated process alone; mentors and administrators review student scores and course projects.
We do not sell personal information. We do not use a student's personal information for targeted advertising, and we do not allow our service providers to do so. We do not profile students for purposes unrelated to their education.
Mentors. Mentors see a student's schedule, progress, and the information needed to support them. College Onramps–provided mentors are contracted with ALS, which background-checks, trains, and supervises them. Parent-designated mentors are not contracted with ALS but receive basic training from ALS along with a comprehensive manual; screening and supervision of a parent-designated mentor is the parent's responsibility.
Service providers. We use vendors to operate the site and platform, including Netlify (our marketing website and the forms on it), Amazon Web Services (the learning platform's hosting, database, and file storage), Redis (session management and caching), Mailgun (transactional email), and our AI providers (above). We don't yet have a dedicated proctoring vendor; once we do, it will be added here and this notice will be updated before proctored exams go live.
Partner universities. If a student chooses to pursue the partner-university pathway, we share student scores and portfolios with the institution the family selects, and only with the family's direction.
Legal and safety. We may disclose information when required by law or valid legal process, or where we believe in good faith it is necessary to protect someone's safety. If we receive a subpoena or a request from a child-protection or school authority concerning a family, we will notify the parent unless prohibited by law.
Business transfers. If ALS is involved in a merger, financing, acquisition, or sale of assets, personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this notice.
We keep records for two years from a student's last activity in the program, except where this notice says otherwise. Proctoring recordings are deleted on the shorter schedule described above. Families can request a copy of a student's coursework and progress before it's deleted, and after a student finishes the program.
You may ask us to give you a copy of the information we hold, correct it, delete it, or provide it in a portable format. You may also ask us to confirm whether we process it at all. Parents may exercise these on behalf of an enrolled minor.
To make a request, email info@collegeonramps.org. We will respond within 5 business days. We may need to verify your identity before acting.
Depending on your state, you may have additional rights. Connecticut and New Jersey residents in particular have rights under those states' data privacy acts.
On the College Onramps website. Our marketing website is hosted on Netlify. The inquiry, quiz, and application forms on the site are processed through Netlify's form-handling service, which may use a limited technical cookie to submit your entry securely. We do not use reCAPTCHA or other spam-filtering on these forms, so no additional Google cookie is set for that purpose.
We embed videos from YouTube using YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode, which limits the cookies YouTube sets until a visitor chooses to play a video.
We also review our YouTube channel's own performance using the analytics dashboard YouTube provides to channel owners. That reporting is generated on Google's side, about our channel as a whole, and doesn't add any script or cookie to the College Onramps website itself.
On the learning platform. The platform uses only strictly necessary cookies and similar technologies required to operate the service, including cookies that keep you signed in and maintain your session. These cannot be disabled. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies on the platform, and we do not respond differently to "Do Not Track" signals there because we do not track platform users across third-party websites.
We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards, including:
No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you and the appropriate authorities as required by law.
ALS-provided mentors and students communicate by email, using an ALS-supervised email account rather than a mentor's personal address, and meet by video through Zoom. We do not use Discord or other consumer chat or social platforms for mentor-student contact. ALS-provided mentors are trained not to request or share personal contact information or connect with a student on personal social media, and to keep communication focused on the program. A supervisor reviews ALS mentor-student email as part of the weekly check-in described above. A parent may ask us for a copy of their student's email history with their mentor.
This section describes ALS-provided mentors only. A parent-designated mentor — who may be the parent themselves — is not bound by these rules, and how that person communicates with the student is left to the family to manage.
We will post any change here with a new effective date and version number. If a change materially affects how we use information about your student, we will notify account holders directly before it takes effect.
Active Learning Sciences, Inc.
info@collegeonramps.org