During the operation of an online teaching/learning system, security is a top priority. As an online system, the teaching/learning system is vulnerable to Internet hackers and hundreds of malicious viruses. A security related problem can cause significant damage to the online teaching/learning system. This kind of damage can possibly shut down the entire system or even spread viruses to the university’s network and infect other systems on the network. To ensure the health of the online teaching/learning system, great effort has to be made to ensure the system’s security. In this chapter, we will investigate issues on securing the online teaching/ learning system.
TopBackground
Security of an e-learning system has caused, in general, a great deal of concern among researchers. The enforcement of security policies often requires great effort from a team which consists of computer service personnel, university administrators, faculty members, and online teaching support staff members. Weippl (2005) addressed the security concern among higher education institutions and demonstrated how administrators can be trained to use the virtual e-learning environment. For pre-college education, Yang and Dark (2005) discussed an information security risk assessment project for a K12 school corporation in their paper. They implemented the risk assessment project to analyze and evaluate the risks in the instructional technology systems. Another security evaluation study was reported by Dark (2003) who gave an overview of security evaluation, evaluation design, evaluation implementation, and evaluation management.
Riola (2006) discussed the security issues related to the wireless network used to support online teaching. Riola (2006) addressed the wireless network implementation and security issues in supporting technology based teaching. For the issues related to the mobile e-learning security, readers can also find information from Weippl’s (2004) paper.
Gokhale (2002) discussed the issues related to the analysis of security vulnerabilities, the development of appropriate security policies, and the enforcement of the security measures. El-Khatib, Korba, Xu, and Yee (2003) presented ways to protect e-learning projects by enforcing appropriate security measures.