privacy and education to-day

1. Renaud Fabre
ISCC/CNRS, Rapport, mars 2013, PARIS, 198 p.
rfabre@ccomptes.fr
PRIVACY AND EDUCATION TO-DAY
Student and teacher identities as seen trough digital education
1. PURPOSE
The purpose of the report is to sketch an overview of research and expertise at global level, which
could answer to two questions:
2. a/ "Why being interested by privacy in education today?
3. b/How privacy is located among others goals among e learning issues to-day?"
Why those questions and why now?
First, because decision-makers are still often living in a fairy tale with e-learning to-day,
because there is a need to describe and locate the various surrounding questions which give access to
balanced practices in a world where e-learning is one of the fastest growing activities.
Second, because emerging quick development of Data mining in e-learning world practices,
leads to a strategic overview of a set of key issues (among whom is technological, cognitive, human
rights, intellectual ownership....and of course privacy).
2. FOCUS
The focus is on:
a- Function of privacy in e-learning.
Privacy is the main condition and also the main tool of future developments of e-learning. Privacy
protection and valorization, is the set of rules which allows people to be recognized and protected in
digital education, which is at least nothing else than a specific digital dialogue (big data, trial and error
process, social network, heterogeneous supply combining human and non human...), in which, more
than in many others dialogue, there is the need for identified individual recognition and choice. The
report come to the conclusion that only privacy protection in the prevailing context of rapidly growing
"E learning analytics, " could altogether boost and secure e-learning developments, which are the
main trend of education dynamic to-day. In an opposite way, all developments of e learning to day
which does not secure privacy (for public as well as for private uses) leads only to growing confusion,
which could reach the level of what I call here a "hiatus numérique".
b- Context of privacy development in education

2. Privacy protection has not been privileged among the fields of development of digital education:
during the last passed years a change emerged in various communities of research but basically, there
has been far more interest for the numerous opportunities of information processing from
educational data, than on the various ways to secure and guarantee that the basic principles of
privacy were enforced in the field of education. Models of e-learning development where almost silent
on that field, as well as those models were merely opened to cognitive parameters of digital
education.
C- Tools of privacy protection.
Models where silent but standards of digital education at ISO level where too, while privacy
standards has been implemented in various other fields encompassing dialogues of transport, e-
business, e-administration and finance. It is only through and ad-hoc group that ISO/JTC1/SC36 came
to consider the opportunity to develop privacy protection in education, which was not one of its
initial leading perspectives.
Nowadays, there is a first part of a multipart standard (29 187-1) which encompasses the
basis definitions, the basic architecture of data, the main principles of privacy protection which could
be effective in main jurisdictional domains in any situation of multiplication of identifiers, of personae,
that any human is allowed to use in educational contexts. Those tools create an opportunity for
research to confront to categories issued by ISO/IEC/29 187-1 standard , and to supply results to
implementation of part 2 and 3 of this multipart standard.
3. INTENDED AUDIENCE
This report is dedicated to the community of pluridiscplinary research aimed at development of "well-
tempered" e-learning projects and activities.
In this is very large scope of works, the report (last part), identifies 10 "recommendations" for
development of coming research. Those items reflects only personal domains of interest of the
author Main output could be discussion on research programming in various recommended fields.
This document is a report to CNRS, which will be followed by scientific discussion in e-learning related
spheres of research. The report is online at ISCC CNRS after the 10th of April
Renaud FABRE march 2013