Security and Privacy in Distance Education

Many applications and tools have been developed to support the design and delivery of distance learning courses. Unfortunately, many of these applications have only cursory provisions for security and privacy, such as authentication based only on user id and password. Given the increased attacks on networked applications and the increased awareness of personal privacy rights, this situation is unacceptable. Indeed, electronic services of all kinds, including distance learning, will never be fully successful until the users of these services are confident that their information is protected from unauthorized access and their privacy assured. In the literature, there are few papers dealing specifically with security and privacy for distance education. El-Khatib, Korba, Xu and Yee (2003) discuss security and privacy for e-learning in terms of legislative requirements, standards and privacy-enhancing technologies. Korba, Yee, Xu, Song, Patrick and El-Khatib (2004) investigate how security and privacy can promote user trust in agent-supported distributed learning. Yee and Korba (2003, 2004) discuss the use and negotiation of privacy policies for distance education. Lin, Korba, Yee and Shih (2004) describe the application of security and privacy technologies to distance learning tools. Yee, Korba, Lin and Shih (2005) present an approach for using context-aware agents to implement security and privacy in distance learning. Holt and Fraser (2003) discuss the psychological and pedagogical motivation for security and privacy.