Privacy Notice

General personal information collected on our websites

When you visit any of the websites within the University of Cambridge domain we hold certain information about you for service and security reasons. For more information on this, please see http://www.cam.ac.uk/about-this-site/privacy-policy. The University VLE Service (Moodle) collects, holds and processes additional personal information in line with the following privacy notice: https://www.uis.cam.ac.uk/privacy-notice.

The University VLE Service (Moodle) also uses your data as set out below.

Legal basis for the use of personal data on Moodle: 

If you have a Raven account and use this to access Moodle, our Legal basis for using your personal information is in order to deliver our contractual obligations to you as a user of our service. 

If you only access Moodle as a Friends user (login to Moodle using a personal email address as a username): We use your personal information with your consent, as given by you to the user (usually a member of a department, college or non-school institution) who originally set your account up and added you to a Moodle course. You always have the right to withdraw your consent. Should you wish to withdraw your consent you should email the Moodle Helpdesk on moodlehelp@uis.cam.ac.uk.

Data held by the Moodle system

Data held by Moodle includes your name, email address, username (crsid or email address) and your University information, such as your College, Department and course 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 publicly available. Summary statistics do not include personal data.

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 is held within the Moodle system. 

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 the Moodle system uses your personal information

Moodle records and uses your personal information to:

• Provide you an account on, and identify you within, the VLE (Moodle) system
• Provide you access to courses/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 courses 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 University related information, such as College, Department and Course).

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 CRSid (Raven users), Moodle uses information supplied by:

• The University directory (Lookup) Service.
• The University authentication (Raven) Service.
• The University student records (CamSIS) Service.
• The University central HR records (CHRIS) Service.
• Relevant University departmental systems and services.

For users who identify themselves through the non-Raven login mechanism (Friends users), Moodle uses information supplied by:

• The Moodle user who creates the account.
• Relevant University departmental systems and services.

Additional information maybe uploaded onto individual courses by users of the system.

Who has access to Moodle data

The Moodle systems team at UIS 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 UIS, 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 Computing Service (e.g. CamCERT) as part of an investigation into computer misuse.

We work with a range of technology suppliers to help us provide the VLE. If we use services provided from outside the EEA, where European data protection law might not apply, our contracts with suppliers include provisions or other suitable mechanisms to ensure the protection of your personal data. For the purposes of technical support and service provision, Moodle data may be accessed by these 3rd party service providers. 

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

Where Moodle data is stored

Moodle data is either stored within University of Cambridge data centres, or within third party cloud systems, where ‘cloud systems’ refers to data centres owned and operated by technology suppliers.  

We work with a range of technology suppliers to help us provide the VLE. If we use services provided from outside the EEA, where European data protection law might not apply, our contracts with suppliers include provisions or other suitable mechanisms to ensure the protection of your personal data.

Moodle data retention

Information and data uploaded to Moodle, including accounts, courses 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 either backed up at a facility managed by UIS, or within third party cloud systems, where ‘cloud systems’ refers to data centres owned and operated by technology suppliers. The backups are held for the purpose of reinstatement of the data, e.g. in the event of failure of a system component.

How the Moodle Helpdesk uses your information

If you approach the Moodle Helpdesk for help with a fault, issue, question or support, Moodle support staff will need to look at your data held on the system, including 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 helpdesk question, reproducing/investigating your issue/problem or when forming a response, the Moodle helpdesk may navigate and interact with Moodle using your account. To do this we may use a feature know as 'login-as' which allows the helpdesk to take control of your account. The helpdesk does 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 helpdesk, 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 helpdesk never gives out your personal information, including usernames and passwords.

Other policies and notices

A full list of relevant policies and notices for Moodle can be found here: https://www.student-systems.admin.cam.ac.uk/moodle/legal.

Further Information

For more information about how we handle your personal information, and your rights under data protection legislation, please see https://www.information-compliance.admin.cam.ac.uk/data-protection/general-data.

This page was last updated in January 2023.