Privacy respecting ICT innovations in education: Electronic course evaluations in higher education and beyond

Abstract

In this paper we present our institute’s vision towards the introduction of privacy respecting innovative ICT services in the Greek educational sector and, gradually, to other sectors of public interest as well. This vision was shaped during our work within the scope of the EU funded research project ABC4Trust in which our institute implemented a pilot system, based on Privacy-ABCs (Attribute Based Credentials) for the support of anonymous course evaluations in Universities. Privacy-ABCs support cryptographic primitives and tools for eIdentity management that allow users to take full control of what personal information they reveal towards the services they use, providing only the information required to satisfy the service policy. We, first, discuss the set-up of the ABC4Trust pliot and then we explain how we plan to extend the pilot scenarios and characteristics in order to boost eParticipation of members of the educational community of Greece, through the Greek School Network (GSN), in a privacy respecting manner. In particular, we discuss a number of scenarios in which Privacy-ABCs play an important role in ascertaining that users of the GSN only reveal their identity elements which are necessary in order to use a school service. Finally, based on the experiences gathered from our pilot, we present our views with respect to the factors that can inhibit or advance the widespread use of innovations, such as the Privacy-ABCs and the systems based on them, in society. We argue that there are two key factors that affect widespread adoption of innovations: (i) initial introduction of the innovation within groups whose members are linked, somehow, with each other and (ii) gradual introduction tomore user groups, of progressively increasing size. This was the model the ABC4Trust project actually adopted in the case of the pilot we discuss in this paper.