Establishing a Privacy-Aware Collaborative eLearning Environment

Supporting privacy in eLearning becomes a commonly admitted important issue when designing according infrastructures. This is motivated by a higher awareness of the users with respect to protecting their personal data. In particular, eLearning comprises many scenarios that clearly spell out risks to the users’ privacy, such as communicating identifying data during classes. Nevertheless, current research activities primarily concentrate on non-collaborative eLearning. While those approaches neglect the direct communication of users, they address the protection of indirect misuse of the data. In contrast, we describe a concept, which is prototypically being realized in the eLearning platform BluES. It aims at as much latitude for the users acting in the collaborative environment as possible – but nevertheless at protecting their personal information. The approach’s objectives are to support the users in managing their learning processes and to partition the activities such that a reasonable collaborative working as well as the protection of privacy are possible. The first issue is facilitated by giving the users free access to all functional possibilities of the eLearning environment, i.e. each user is allowed to do anything – within the frame of generally agreed rules and directives. In order to provide reasonable access control, BluES integrates a privacy-enhancing identity management system, which is part of the research project PRIME. This way, users are guaranteed that processing their personal data on services side is reduced to a minimum. Furthermore, they can keep track of all transactions of their data, which allows for maximal transparency.