A framework for privacy-preserving e-learning

Abstract

E-learning systems have made considerable progress within the last few years. Nonetheless, the issue of learner privacy has been practically ignored. The security of E-learning systems offers some privacy protection, but remains unsatisfactory on several levels. In this work, we corroborate the need for privacy in E-learning systems. In particular, we introduce a framework for privacy preserving E-learning to provide the learner with the possibility of combining different levels of Privacy and Tracking to satisfy his personal privacy concerns. This allows the learner to perform learning activities and to prove his achievements (such as with anonymous transcripts and anonymous degrees) without exposing various aspects of his private data. In addition, we introduce the Blind Digital Certificate, a digital certificate that does not reveal the learner's identity. Finally, we report on the implementation and validation of our approach in the context of an E-testing system. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.