The work of the TUS (Technical University of Sofia) team in the second pilot of the TeSLA system was focused on integration of TeSLA instruments in e-assessment activities in real blended educational process. The student’s identifier (SID) in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) of a blended educational process has to be connected with the university student identification system, which is part of the university Management Information System (MIS). In TUS such interoperability was achieved by using the students’ university identifier and e-mail address, uniformly generated for all students. They are unique and are not subject to change. From mathematical point of view, the security of information, and most of all, the one serving for identification purposes in the university and the VLE must ensure unambiguous mapping, which is achieved by means of transformation procedure. TUS implemented this transformation by randomization, which ensures bijective mapping with sufficient degree of security.
Students’ identification concerns Security and Personal Data Protection issues. The blended educational process demands proper organization and method for dealing with this matter. TUS decided to use three-tier organization of identification at VLE level.
A three-tier architecture is a client-server architecture in which the university management system, VLE and the TeSLA authentication system are organized and maintained as independent modules. Each tier is physically separate within the system integrated structure.
Student identifiers from the University Management Information System are entered into the VLE. They are algorithmically coded in the interim VLE tier, which is accessible by the university only. The generated pseudo identifiers are sent to the TeSLA server as “blind signatures”. The TeSLA server uses them in the autentification procedures. The returned results are transferred to the intermediate VLE level “blind”. The intermediate level performs the decoding and transmits the actual user information to the university management system.
During the second pilot of the TeSLA system randomization algorithm based on mixed-base number systems was used. It provides for mutually unambiguous reversible decoding.
It proved to provide satisfactory level of protection and security of personal data. In the third pilot this practice may be useful for other partners.
The TUS team
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