A process framework for securing an e-Learning ecosystem

E-Learning is a pedagogy empowered by Information and Communication technologies supporting education / training. While e-Learning exists over the past decade and a half, it is receiving considerable attention only in the recent times. Both Industry and Academia are heavily depending on e-Learning in streamlining their teaching process and also in meeting the just-in-time learning requirements of individual learners. Though huge budget is spent in creating, maintaining and offering the courses through e-Learning, security is still not considered as an important aspect in e-Learning. This leads to unauthorized access to course content, thread of discussions and evaluation reports of the learners. Any security compromise in e-Learning Ecosystem will have a serious impact on credibility of the institution. While security tools are used to tackle various issues independently, these alone will not suffice but process should be in place in order to address the continuously growing security threat. Through this paper, various security & privacy risks associated with e-Learning are enumerated and a process framework is proposed for securing an e-Learning Ecosystem, which helps to address the security problem in a systematic way in order to foster the benefits of e-Learning.