The Protected Users Plugin Tool for Moodle. Helps protect students' data and identity.
In 2018 Moodle included support for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. This support allows setting the terms of service with regard to data confidentiality and privacy for the Moodle installation. Moodle will ask the students to accept the privacy settings and will keep track of their choice. Those who do not accept the terms will not be able to use the service.
This all or nothing approach is not taking into consideration the full extension of the right to object to certain kinds of treatment of personal information. While it is fair to block access to a service if the student can't or won't accept the terms when this makes impossible to render the service. However, there are certain aspects of the usual terms of service that while being convenient for the institution and the LMS usual operations, a student could object without making impossible for her to access the courses.
For example: In a Moodle course, students are supposed to interact with each other in several ways: Forum discussions, group tasks, chat, collaboration on wiki pages. A student is able to see the name, picture, and profile page of their peers in a course. This feature is part of the very design of Moodle inspired by the principles of social constructionism.
A student can object to sharing her information with peer students for a number of valid reasons. Some say that these cases are exceptions and we should not re-design our virtual campuses and services around these exceptions. But, guess what: for the last 40 years, we have been redesigning our brick and mortar campuses and schools to make them accessible.
Exceptions matter.
We propose a modification to Moodle to deal in an easy way with these exceptions. Our modification of Moodle is simple and clean, changing as little as possible to the Moodle code.
We propose that the users that, for justifiable reasons, do not want their data shared with other students to be considered as "protected users". A protected user is a standard user, but it will not be enrolled in any course.
A "protected used" can have aliases. An Alias is a regular Moodle user, with the particularity that all its personal information is fake. It can be invented or generated with a fancy AI thing.
The Data Privacy Officer (whoever performs this role) will have an interface for creating Aliases and the assignment to protected users.
In this way, we can separate the management of personal information necessary for the learning institution to manage and the data about the student that other students see as part of their learning activity.