Protected Users: A Moodle Plugin To Improve Confidentiality and Privacy Support through User Aliases

Daniel Amo, Marc Alier, Francisco José García-Peñalvo, David Fonseca and María José Casañ
Additional contact information
Daniel Amo: Departament d’Informàtica, Universitat Ramón Llull, La Salle, 08022 Barcelona, Spain
Marc Alier: Departament d’Enginyeria de Serveis i Sistemes d’Informació, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 08034 Barcelona, Spain
Francisco José García-Peñalvo: Departamento de Informática y Automática, Instituto Universitario de Ciencias de la Educación, Grupo GRIAL, Universidad de Salamanca, 37008 Salamanca, Spain
David Fonseca: Departament d’Arquitectura, Universitat Ramón Llull, La Salle, 08022 Barcelona, Spain
María José Casañ: Departament d’Enginyeria de Serveis i Sistemes d’Informació, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 08034 Barcelona, Spain

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 6, 1-16

Abstract: The privacy policies, terms, and conditions of use in any Learning Management System (LMS) are one-way contracts. The institution imposes clauses that the student can accept or decline. Students, once they accept conditions, should be able to exercise the rights granted by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, students cannot object to data processing and public profiling because it would be conceived as an impediment to teachers to execute their work with normality. Nonetheless, regarding GDPR and consulted legal advisors, a student could claim identity anonymization in the LMS, if adequate personal justifications are provided. Per contra, the current LMSs do not have any functionality that enables identity anonymization. This is a big problem that generates undesired situations which urgently requires a definitive solution. In this work, we surveyed students and teachers to validate the feasibility and acceptance of using aliases to anonymize their identity in LMSs as a sustainable solution to the problem. Considering the positive results, we developed a user-friendly plugin for Moodle that enables students’ identity anonymization by the use of aliases. This plugin, presented in this work and named Protected users, is publicly available online at GitHub and published under GNU General Public License.

Keywords: LMS; Moodle; GDPR; plugin; data privacy; confidentiality; alias; digital identity; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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