Towards integrating security services in e-learning platforms

E-learning has become of great importance nowadays, starting at the point of simplifying and improving learning in the academic institutions, to saving time and money by providing special training in the companies. E-learning platforms are evolving in a rapid way into modular platforms based on service oriented architectures providing flexibility and services reusability. In this work, in one hand, we highlight the importance of securing e-learning platforms: we start a review of the first e-learning generation where the focus was on sharing learning content, the second generation that added sharing of learning objects between different platforms, and the third generation based on service oriented architecture, where content, tools, and functionalities are available for reuse in a dynamic environment. On the other hand, we explain the security challenges, both, the first and the second e-learning generations might be facing, we then discuss the service oriented architecture security challenges in distributed environments, and finally, as a conclusion, we propose a security service based architecture to securing third e-learning generation.