Google Doc Ownership Transfer Setup for IT Admins

This article is for district IT admins setting up Google Doc Ownership Transfer.

If your teachers use Boost Writing Coach and want students to submit their work in Google Classroom, Brisk can turn on Google Doc Ownership Transfer for your district. 

Before Brisk enables Google Doc Ownership Transfer, confirm the prerequisites below and make sure to enable ownership transfer in the Google Admin Console.

Once enabled, ownership of the Google Doc transfers to the student when they turn in their assignment in Google Classroom. Teachers can then give feedback or use Inspect Writing to review the student's writing process on their submission.

To turn on this feature, contact Brisk at hello@briskteaching.com and ask for Google Doc Ownership Transfer to be enabled for your district.

IT Admins: Before you turn on Google Doc Ownership Transfer

Confirm your district meets these requirements before reaching out to Brisk:

1. Check your Workspace edition — Your district must be on Google Workspace for Education. Personal Gmail accounts and non-Education Workspace editions aren't supported.
    
2. Confirm Admin Console access — You'll need access to the Google Admin Console to update sharing settings.

IT Admins: How to enable ownership transfer in the Admin Console

1. Open sharing settings — In the Google Admin Console, go to Apps → Google Workspace → Drive and Docs → Sharing settings.
    
2. Turn on ownership transfer — Enable the ownership transfer permission for the relevant organizational units (OUs) that include your teachers/staff and your students. Ownership transfer requires this permission on both the sending account's OU and the receiving account's OU.
    
3. Check for Organizational Unit overrides — If your district scopes sharing permissions differently by school or grade band, confirm there's no stricter override blocking ownership transfer for a specific school or grade, even if the domain-wide setting looks correct.
    
4. Test the transfer — Before relying on the Admin Console setting alone, be sure to test an actual ownership transfer with a test teacher and test student account.
   1. Have a test teacher account open a Google Doc that is shared with the test student account.
   2. Click File > Share > Share with others.
   3. Find the test student account and select their role on the document > click Transfer Ownership and Transfer document ownership.

If you cannot transfer ownership to the student, return to your Sharing settings in the Google Admin Console and make adjustments.

Learn more — See Google's documentation on file ownership transfer for how transfer works on Google's side.

5. Contact Brisk to turn on the feature — Once your settings are confirmed, email hello@briskteaching.com and ask for Google Doc Ownership Transfer to be turned on for your district.

FAQ

• Will teachers have access to the document after the transfer? — Once ownership transfers to the student, teachers retain shared access to the document, but the student becomes the owner. If the student later removes the teacher's access to the doc directly, the teacher loses visibility into it.
  
  The document is located in the student’s Google Drive, but the teacher will have a shortcut to that file. Teachers will see a “shortcut” to the student work in their “Brisk Boost Activities” folder. 

• Are Google Classroom submissions protected? — Google Classroom preserves teacher access to submissions independently of direct doc sharing.
   
• What about data retention and legal hold? — If your district has data retention or legal hold policies tied to file ownership, review them before enabling this feature. Ownership transfer changes the file's owner of record.