Privacy Preserving Course Evaluations in Greek Higher Education Institutes: An e-Participation Case Study with the Empowerment of Attribute Based Credentials

Abstract

Course evaluations enable educational institutions to adjust their teaching methodologies and curricula in order to suit, best, their students’ needs. Such evaluations in Greece are being conducted for many years in higher education institutes based on traditional print questionnaires handed-out to students at the lecture room. Compared to traditional paper-based questionnaires, the introduction of electronic student evaluation procedures has a number of advantages that merit consideration. a) it allows the students to evaluate courses from their home at their ease and beyond privacy breaches (e.g. by avoiding his/her fellow student looking at his/her answers), b) results are automatically archived in electronic format allowing fast further processing for the extraction of useful information, and c) it offers the possibility of using strong cryptographic tools to ensure student anonymity and data confidentiality. In this report we describe a pilot system that is being developed by the Computer Technology Institute & Press - “Diophantus” (CTI) within the context of the project ABC4Trust. The project’s main goal is the development of a reference implementation of a privacy preserving eIdentity management framework based on the cryptographic primitives called Attribute Based Credentials. The pilot system will offer to a group of selected students the possibility of evaluating courses they have taken from their homes through the Internet and provide their feedback proving their eligibility to participate in the evaluation while, at the same time, preserving their anonymity. In this paper we describe the architecture and main scenarios of the pilot. CTI’s long term vision is to use the pilot as a small scale proof of concept of privacy enhancement technologies in the eParticipation domain in order to introduce, in the future, of these technologies to the educational communities of all levels in Greece. These technologies will be the vehicle for supporting privacy preserving eParticipation in discussion groups whereby participants will provide their opinion anonymously but after proving that they are eligible to participate in group discussions.