Moodle Privacy Policy

When you visit any of the websites within the University of Waikato domain we hold certain information about you for service and security reasons.

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The University Learning Management System (Moodle) collects, holds and processes additional personal information in line with the following privacy notice 

The University Learning Management System (Moodle) also uses your data as set out below.

Legal basis for the use of personal data on Moodle

If you have a University account, and use this to access Moodle, our legal basis for using your personal information is to allow us to deliver our contractual obligations to you as a user of our service.

Data held by Moodle

Data held by Moodle includes your name, and email address, as well as your University information, such as your ID number, username and enrolled paper information. It may contain other user contributed information.

Moodle logs contain detailed information about user activity within each course, including the date and time of when course-specific information was viewed and/or updated, the address of the machine from which the access was made, the browser identification information and information about the referring web page. Logs are used to create summary statistics which may be made internally available. Summary statistics do not include personal data.

The Moodle system contains information about contributions to courses, including contributions to chat rooms and discussion forums, ownership of resources, assignment/file submissions, text matching scores and evidence of participation in other Moodle-based activities.

Information and data related to users, including grades, feedback comments, scores, completion data, access rights and group membership is also recorded.

Additional personal data may be held within individual courses, either within documents/resources uploaded to the course, or within activities within the course. Other than contributions to chat rooms and discussion forums which are submitted by individuals in a personal capacity, course maintainers are responsible for the information held about you that may be uploaded onto such courses.

How Moodle uses your personal information

Moodle records and uses your personal information to:

• Provide you an account to access, and be identifiable within, the University’s Learning Management System (Moodle)
• Provide you access to papers/sites within Moodle
• Provide you the ability to upload, amend and delete certain information within Moodle
• Provide you access to the information, resources and activities uploaded to Moodle
• Control access to different parts of the system.
• Help support Moodle users
• For system administration and bug tracking
• Report on course, resource and activity access, activity completion, course completion and course data (such as grades, scores, submissions and content uploaded)
• For producing usage statistics for management and planning purposes

Individual papers within Moodle may collect additional personal information in order to:

• Provide services to the users
• Facilitate and support business processes
• Support users in their use of Moodle

A non-exhaustive list of examples of this may include:

• Booking information
• User feedback
• Data collection for the purposes of business processes
• Contact information
• Application information

Where Moodle information comes from

For all users, Moodle records information supplied by the user. This includes information entered into your profile (such as telephone numbers, addresses) and data automatically entered via the University Student Management System (SITS), such as username, ID number and enrolled papers.

As well as the information that you upload and submit to Moodle, Moodle also contains additional information.

For users who identify themselves to the system with their University Username, Moodle uses information supplied by:

• The University authentication (ADFS) Service.
• The University student records (SITS) Service.
• The University central HR records.
• Relevant University departmental systems and services.

Additional information may be uploaded onto individual papers by users of the system.

Who has access to Moodle data

The Moodle systems team at The University of Waikato has access to all information stored within Moodle for the purposes set out above.

All course administrators and maintainers have access to the personal information of the other users of that course.

Access to Moodle logs is restricted to authorised staff at ITS/CeTTL with the exception of course-specific tracking data which is also made accessible to course maintainers where an appropriate course-specific privacy policy is in place.

Relevant subsets of this data may be passed to computer security teams at the University ITS as part of an investigation into computer misuse.

Where Moodle information is shared

Moodle shares your personal information with other systems within the University

Certain data may be shared with the Text Matching Service (Turnitin) and Lecture Capture Service (Panopto). Their privacy notices are:

• Text Matching Service (Turnitin):  Turnitin Privacy and Security notices and Turnitin User agreement
• Lecture Capture Service (Panopto): Panopto Video Platform Privacy Policy and Panopto Terms of Service

Moodle data retention

Information and data uploaded to Moodle, including accounts, papers and about contributions to courses, including contributions to chat rooms and discussion forums, ownership of resources and evidence of participation in other Moodle-based activities may be retained indefinitely.

Moodle data is backed up at a facility managed by ITS. The backups are held for the purpose of reinstatement of the data, e.g. in the event of failure of a system component.

Integrated Services

You may be given the option to access or register for the Service through the use of your username and passwords for certain services provided by third parties (each, an “Integrated Service”), such as through the use of your Microsoft account, or otherwise have the option to authorize an Integrated Service to provide Personal Data or other information to us.

By authorising us to connect with an Integrated Service, you authorise us to access and store your name, email address(es), and basic profile information that the Integrated Service makes available to us, and to use and disclose it in accordance with this Policy. You should check your privacy settings on each Integrated Service to understand what information that Integrated Service makes available to us, and make changes as appropriate.

Please review each Integrated Service’s terms of use and privacy policies carefully before using their services and connecting to our Service.

How ITS uses your information

If you approach the ITS service desk for help with a fault, issue, question or support, Moodle support staff will need to look at your data held on the system, which may include files in your personal areas and the Moodle courses to which you belong. We may need to perform any of the following:

• In the process of providing support, answering your Service Desk question, reproducing/investigating your issue/problem or when forming a response, the Moodle support staff may navigate and interact with Moodle using your account. To do this we may use a feature known as 'login-as' which allows the Moodle admins to impersonate your Moodle login. The Moodle admins do not add, edit or delete any data within Moodle when doing this, without your prior permission. We will never ask you to send your password to us as part of any support that we provide.
• The Moodle support staff, when providing support to your query, may also duplicate your course or data and transfer it into another part of the system or one of our test systems. This is to allow us to carry out investigations, test solutions and provide you with support.
• When providing support, the Moodle support staff never divulges your personal information to third parties, including usernames and passwords.

Other policies and notices

A full list of relevant policies and notices.