Intra-application partitioning in an eLearning environment - a discussion of critical aspects

In the course of the strengthened activities in eBusiness and the connected increasing awareness of privacy aspects, users of another application area become more and more sensitized of the problem field of the users´ privacy $eLearning. With this paper we aim to increase the consciousness of the eLearning community for the relevance of preserving privacy by intra-application partitioning (IAP) in eLearning applications. This, especially, relates to collaborative eLearning environments where the contact to others is the basis of knowledge gathering and building, but, also implies an enhanced risk with respect to one´s privacy. Therefore, we discuss concrete collaborative educational examples which illustrate that IAP by means of context recognition improves users´ situation from a privacy perspective. Nevertheless, the paper discusses also critical aspects one has to consider when partitioning users´ personal data and describes possible solutions. This allows for coming to the conclusion that intra-application data partitioning improves working in the application for the user but does not threaten the enforcement of crucial aspects.