Context-aware privacy and security agents for distance education

2003

Distance learning involves a lot of work of human assistants. These assistants need to be connected for answering student doubts and questions. Intelligent agents can do part of this repetitive work because they can observe students interacting with educational courses, detect learning troubles of these students, and then suggest them some way for overcoming those troubles. However, a design problem appears with this promised possibility: how to connect educational applications with these agents. This paper presents a solution to this problem, in which both the capture of student's intentions and agent intervention for helping students are specified. These two architectural design points are defined as connection points. The first connection point is named student intentions. Student intentions define situations in which agents might help. This connection point depends on the user interface of the educational application that students are using; the agent needs to know the gestures that students could do for interpreting their intentions. The second connection point is named agent interventions. Agent interventions define the context in which agent might assist and the type of help that might give, like a suggestion or a warning. This solution is introduced in the context of one specific application for distance learning named SAVER, which is used for exemplifying each architectural design point.

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Lifelong Learning, 2004

Adaptive learning systems typically involve learner profiles with sensitive information and activities that might breach learner's privacy, such as tracking, profiling or collaborative filtering. In this paper we discuss privacy aspects of personalisation and adaptation in smart spaces for learning. A smart space for learning is a system for mediation of learning services, which is being developed in the EU IST ELENA project. We present privacy threats and requirements in smart spaces for learning with focus on a learner, we model learner profile data that are necessary for privacy protection, and propose privacy-enhancing technology based solutions.

2014

— E-Learning, the new technology of supporting education and training, in recent times has been gaining a lot of attention. Content retrieval in e-learning refers the way by which the learning content is provided by means of electronic medium. It is an effective web-based learning paradigm, where many agents can be assigned with unique responsibilities to cope-up with the content retrieval by various users. Agent based system can manage the information stored in the e-learning environment, accessing and granting access permissions. Each task can be carried out by an autonomous agent and various such agents are grouped to form a multi-agent based system. Existing architectures do not consider the enhanced security measures, where it holds security as one among the agents. In the proposed architecture, security is enhanced at the network level and it wraps up all the other agents providing an enhanced security.

M-Learning with its various advantages has been recognized as the need of the hour by the various organizations and universities and they are resorting to online education. However, though it may seem a very simple task the need of security and privacy in the domain is essential and it has been ignored for quite some time. In few of the exceptions made to the above statement, the accommodation of security and privacy has been done at arbitrary level which is not planned. We can term security as the methodology of ensuring integrity of data and to protect the policies of the organization implementing the m-Learning. While privacy is maintaining of an environment where the student can control how his private information is stored and shared. The paper would be discussing the elementary rules and practices of security and privacy. It would also analyze the commonly accepted standard of m-Learning to examine how they deal with security and privacy. Requirement of privacy in the m-Learning system is done keeping " Privacy principles " in mind.

This paper presented the main information, security problems and threats in open multi-agent distributed e-learning information systems and Proposed various approaches to solve information security attacks in virtual learning environment using service oriented architecture which based on multi-agent information systems architecture, the solution on the multi-agent learning information system implementation based on the implementation of two types of systems the first system with the centralized mobile agent information security management and the second system with decentralized mobile agents security management, and proposed the migration behavior simulation for their active software components (software agents) .

Learning analytics (LA) is often considered as a means to improve learning and learning environments by measuring student behaviour, analysing the tracked data and acting upon the results. The use of LA tools implies recording and processing of student activities conducted on software platforms. This paper proposes a flexible, contextual and intuitive way to provide the teacher with full control over student activity tracking in online learning environments. We call this approach AngeLA, inspired by an angel guarding over LA privacy. AngeLA mimics in a virtual space the privacy control mechanism that works well in a physical room: if a person is present in a room, she is able to observe all activities happening in the room. AngeLA serves two main purposes: (1) it increases the awareness of teachers about the activity tracking and (2) provides an intuitive way to manage the activity tracking permissions. This approach can be applied to various learning environments and social media platforms. We have implemented AngeLA in Graasp, a social platform that fosters collaborative activities.

Conference on Frontiers in Education, 2009

This paper presents a service that provides security through the technology of Web services. The use of web services to provide security in e-learning systems will complement the features of services developed in language and/or different architectures. Thus, our work is not limited to platforms in which the client (e-learning system) was developed, since this service is provided on a

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Lifelong Learning, 2002

The emergence of the Internet has radically changed the way in which we learn, teach and train. This paper proposes an integrated and extensible architecture for agent-based distance learning. The architecture provides component-based extensibility, allowing emerging technologies to be plugged-in, so that they can produce synergy. It provides HTTP and IIOP connections for maintaining and delivering courseware to students. Via the HTTP connection, our Persona system provides the personalization service to each set of courseware, allowing it to customize its content and/or presentation contextsensitively. This service facilitates the effective delivery of courseware. Via the IIOP connection, our SoftDock system provides the foundation facility allowing users to work collaboratively in teams. Our current educational domain is software modeling. Participants learn the basic concepts and principles of software modeling, and then leverage their newly-acquired modeling skills. We believe our work provides a blue print for showing how emerging technologies can be applied to practical distance learning applications.

As a result of the continuous innovation in the development of applications to improve on-line and distance learning the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (DIEEC) of the Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED) has been developing different projects: Pedagogical Distributed Group Care (PED-CARE); E-Learning Thematic Network (eLearnTN); and the last two PROFIT projects: Management Integrated System of Students Virtual Communities (SvaSIG) and Education Applications based on the Geographic Location through WLAN Networks (wi-fi). As main results from those projects the DIEEC is now involved in MosaicLearning: Developing services to mobile, open source, standards-based and secure, contextaware, individualized and collaborative Learning. The project is being developing by consolidated researching groups in Spain that could provide knowledge to different aspects of the e-learning process. Partnership includes two distance learning Universities and four traditional ones having the widest learning scenarios where could be possible to evaluate the project results.

International Journal for e-Learning Security, 2017

Prior research in the e-learning area has appeared with a focus on its adoption aspects. Limited research has been carried out solely on the interplay between e-learning and security and privacy. Considering the wide acceptance of e-learning, and a plethora of cybersecurity breach incidents, it is surprising that the two topics have not been discussed together. An effective e-learning environment depends on stakeholders who understand the importance of security and behave responsibly within it. In this paper, we present a conceptual model that looks at some of the information security and privacy factors related to e-learning.