Security and privacy in Online Education

by Naeva Tec

The need for online education due to the current confinement situation caused by the Covid-19 has gone through using the tools that each educational centre or teacher has selected. This selection has been made based on the capabilities of the tools, cost and simplicity of use, but without having been properly evaluated regarding the privacy and security they can guarantee.  

Some Spanish media are already echoing the shortcomings that the most used tools may have regarding privacy and security, as well as the actual treatment of personal data that they may be doing. This is frankly worrisome because we are talking of personal data, school performance and location of minors, and these are particularly sensitive data. And although schools and parents share some concern in this regard, they do not find enough options or information and are faced with the dilemma of joining the aforementioned applications even with the risk that they may pose to privacy or that their children may lose the course or at least disconnect of the tasks and content that are being taught online.

In turn, companies such as Naeva Tec have tailor-made solutions based on Open Source Software that is easily auditable and can be installed on the gubernamental education servers themselves or in public or private clouds, but using local databases, using the same type of mix of technologies and servers (local and cloud) that banks use where security and privacy are more than evaluated and audited. Although these tools today are not widespread in Spain.

What tools are available today?

OpenVidu

Naeva Tec is in a position to offer OpenVidu to educational centres, companies or individuals for video calls. It is a safe substitute for Zoom or Jitsi, since the servers used can be unique to each client, and can be selected by the client so that they can be on their own premises or in the cloud of their choice. Even a mid-range laptop can host an OpenVidu server capable of supporting a video call for a small number of users* . In addition OpenVidu by default does not force any specific type of login and can be integrated with the corporate logins managed by the company or institution itself.

You can find more information at https://openvidu.io 

OpenVidu for Teaching

OpenVidu for Teaching is an application based on OpenVidu that provides highly desirable functionalities when making video calls in the educational context, for example during the video-conference exclusively the teacher is able to see all students by default (and only if the student has the camera enabled). Only the teacher will appear on the screen of the other students, but students may request to intervene through the “raise the hand” functionality and the teacher can then make them visible to others. In this way the noise that can be generated by having the video and audio streams of all the participants is eliminated and the classes can be much more efficient but equally participative.

But is there an integrated tool?

Currently Naeva Tec has participated in an OpenSource tool called FullTeaching that has served as a demonstrator in European research projects and as the basis for a RETOS project by the government of Spain. This tool can be customised for each client according to their needs, but it provides the following default capabilities:

  • Course or subject management
  • For each course / subject:
    • The teacher can post resources such as PDFs or links
    • There is a forum with a video forum for the asynchronous interaction of the participants (students and teachers)
    • There is a schedule of sessions programmed by the teacher. These sessions are video conferences based on OpenVidu for Teaching.

This project is easily customisable and extensible with on-demand functionalities.

In summary, there are tools that can allow online education at different levels, based on Open Source tools, which makes them fully auditable and where the data is managed by customers, in this case, companies or organizations, which can clearly guarantee compliance with the GDPR and it is not necessary shared with third parties. 

What if this is not exactly what I need?

At Naeva Tec we make available to companies, organizations and individuals all the knowledge that we have acquired when designing and developing the above tools so that we can collaborate closely with them in creating tools that meet 100% of the educational requirements that they may present us.

You can get more information through our contact form

 

* Always depending on the communication network you have and the actual computing capacity of the laptop.