Reputation Management in Privacy-Enhanced E-learning

Both privacy and trust are essential elements of an effective e-learning environment. Privacy provides a personal space to a member of an e-learning community, while trust is a crucial enabler for meaningful and mutually beneficial interactions that build and sustain collaboration (e.g. collaborative learning). Identity management (in the form of various degree of anonymity) is one technology-based approach to protect privacy. However, privacy-enhancing identity management (PIM) impedes trustworthiness assessment of an actor. We propose a guarantor-mediated reputation management together with a context-based identity management scheme (e.g. long-term or transaction term pseudonymity) to assess trustworthiness of actors without requiring specific knowledge of their identity. As part of such a reputation management system, a model for reputation transfer among the multiple pseudo-identities is presented where we deal with reputation in different contexts without compromising identity and thereby facilitating trust while preserving privacy.