Information Security Trends and Issues in the Moodle E-Learning Platform: An Ethnographic Content Analysis

Empirical research on information security trends and practices in e-learning is scarce. Many articles that have been published apply basic information security concepts to e-learning and list potential threats or propose frameworks for classifying threats. The purpose of this research is to identify, categorize and understand trends and issues in information security in e-learning as reflected in the discussions on a ‘Security and Privacy’ discussion forum of the Moodle learning management system. Four primary themes were identified, as two-thirds of the security related threads on the discussion board addressed the following topics: authentication, permissions, attacks and Moodle configuration. This study should be of interest to educators in information systems management on several levels. First of all, as users and in some cases ad-hoc administrators of learning management systems, the themes and trends identified should increase awareness of security issues inherent in the platform. Secondly, this article serves as a descriptive case study on how security issues are described, discussed and dealt with by developers, users and administrators within the open source software development paradigm.