Protected Users: A Moodle Plugin To Improve Confidentiality and Privacy Support through User Aliases
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Departament d’Informàtica, Universitat Ramón Llull, La Salle, 08022 Barcelona, Spain
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Departament d’Enginyeria de Serveis i Sistemes d’Informació, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 08034 Barcelona, Spain
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Departamento de Informática y Automática, Instituto Universitario de Ciencias de la Educación, Grupo GRIAL, Universidad de Salamanca, 37008 Salamanca, Spain
4
Departament d’Arquitectura, Universitat Ramón Llull, La Salle, 08022 Barcelona, Spain
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2020, 12(6), 2548; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062548
Received: 21 February 2020
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Revised: 16 March 2020
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Accepted: 20 March 2020
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Published: 24 March 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Opportunities and Challenges for the Future of Open Education)
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.
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Keywords:
LMS; Moodle; GDPR; plugin; data privacy; confidentiality; alias; digital identity; sustainability
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MDPI and ACS Style
Amo, D.; Alier, M.; García-Peñalvo, F.J.; Fonseca, D.; Casañ, M.J. Protected Users: A Moodle Plugin To Improve Confidentiality and Privacy Support through User Aliases. Sustainability 2020, 12, 2548. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062548
AMA Style
Amo D, Alier M, García-Peñalvo FJ, Fonseca D, Casañ MJ. Protected Users: A Moodle Plugin To Improve Confidentiality and Privacy Support through User Aliases. Sustainability. 2020; 12(6):2548. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062548
Chicago/Turabian StyleAmo, Daniel, Marc Alier, Francisco J. García-Peñalvo, David Fonseca, and María J. Casañ. 2020. "Protected Users: A Moodle Plugin To Improve Confidentiality and Privacy Support through User Aliases" Sustainability 12, no. 6: 2548. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062548
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