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

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 GeneralData Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, students cannot object to data processing and publicprofiling because it would be conceived as an impediment to teachers to execute their work withnormality. Nonetheless, regarding GDPR and consulted legal advisors, a student could claim identityanonymization in the LMS, if adequate personal justifications are provided. Per contra, the currentLMSs do not have any functionality that enables identity anonymization. This is a big problemthat 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 toanonymize their identity in LMSs as a sustainable solution to the problem. Considering the positiveresults, we developed a user-friendly plugin for Moodle that enables students’ identity anonymizationby the use of aliases. This plugin, presented in this work and named Protected users, is publiclyavailable online at GitHub and published under GNU General Public License.