Providing Security to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: An Overview

Over the last two decades, a great variety of forms of e-Learning has been widely adopted and intensively exploited in most of educational institutions. As a result, e-Learning needs have been evolving accordingly with more and more demanding pedagogical and technological requirements. Given the added pedagogical value of group work, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning has become one of the most influencing educational paradigms devoted to improve teaching and learning by the use of modern ICT. On the other hand, recently, there has been an increasing attention and demand of new requirements related to information security, with the aim to enhance the learning efficacy by adopting a secure perspective for each and every learning process and resource, as well as the information transmitted and shared. However, the development of CSCL systems guided by security as a key and transversal requirement has been, to the best of our knowledge, little investigated. In order to fill this gap, this paper provides firstly an overview of the current developments of CSCL systems from the security perspective. Then, the paper discusses on the problems caused in collaborative learning processes by the lack of security. Finally, the main guidelines for the design of secure CSCL systems are proposed to guide developers to incorporate security as an essential requirement into the collaborative learning process.