Computer Ethics

Il presente articolo parla di “abitare” il mondo digitale con sapienza, non di  “usarlo”. Come diceva Mons. Carlo María Martini, i media sono già “un’atmosfera, un ambiente nel quale si è immersi, che ci avvolge e ci penetra da ogni lato. Cercherò di offrire alcuni suggerimenti su come i consacrati possono affrontare certe sfide poste dall’era digitale. A tale riguardo, viene richiamata l’importanza della formazione e la necessità di coltivare un’interiorità matura e ricettiva. Fornirò pure alcune indicazioni sul modo in cui i consacrati possono evangelizzare e rendere ragione della propria speranza in questo nuovo ambiente. In conclusione, farò un cenno all’attualità della tradizione francescana nel necessario processo di inculturazione.

Sommario:
1. Una nuova cultura da abitare

1.1 Un tema ineludibile
1.2 Media e pastorale: un costante invito dal vaticano ii in poi
1.3 L’accesso alla rete nelle comunità religiose
1.4 Il sacerdote e la parrocchia nell’era digitale

2. Formarsi per essere liberi in un ambiente mediatizzato

2.1 Superare la dipendenza dal “mi piace”
2.2 Dall’informazione frammentaria alla narrazione

2.2.1. Imparare a narrare
2.2.2. Caratteristiche della narrazione

2.3 La specificità della formazione nella vita consacrata

3. Coltivare un’interiorità matura, attiva e recettiva

3.1 Il silenzio e “la solitudine sonora”
3.2 Il ritiro e la clausura

4. Uno stile proprio di abitare le reti

4.1 Testimoni in prima persona
4.2 “La bellezza che innamora”

5. Evangelizzare e comunicare nell’era digitale

5.1. Una comunicazione diretta e cordiale
5.2 La comunicazione di papa francesco
5.3. Cercando la sintonia dei cuori

Conclusione

The essential difficulty about Computer Ethics’ (CE) philosophical status is a methodological problem: standard ethical theories cannot easily be adapted to deal with CE-problems, which appear to strain their conceptual resources, and CE requires a conceptual foundation as an ethical theory. Information Ethics (IE), the philosophical foundational counterpart of CE, can be seen as a particular case of ‘environmental’ ethics or ethics of the infosphere. What is good for an information entity and the infosphere in general? This is the ethical question asked by IE. The answer is provided by a minimalist theory of deserts: IE argues that there is something more elementary and fundamental than life and pain, namely being, understood as information, and entropy, and that any information entity is to be recognised as the centre of a minimal moral claim, which deserves recognition and should help to regulate the implementation of any information process involving it. IE can provide a valuable perspective from which to approach, with insight and adequate discernment, not only moral problems in CE, but also the whole range of conceptual and moral phenomena that form the ethical discourse.

are two of a long series of studies conducted over the past decade on the status of cybersecurity. From year to year, data about cyber attacks and their impact continue to increase indicating that cyber attacks pose an ever-growing threat for information societies. There are two lessons to be learned from these data. The first lesson is not controversial , digital infrastructures are porous. We should think of them as agile, flexible, but brittle systems. This brittleness, as I argued elsewhere (Taddeo 2016, 2017a), favours offence over defence, explaining in part the continue growth of cyber threats and the escalation of their impact. The more digital technologies become pervasive, the wider becomes the surface of attacks, and with it also number of successful attacks grows. Think for example about the distribution of Internet of Things (IoT). In 2018, a Symantec study reported an average of 5200 attacks per month on IoT devices, the figure almost double the 3650 attacks counted in 2016. The second lesson may be harder to learn, for it is about the inadequacy of the ways in which we have framed and governed cybersecurity. This is clear when considering that data on the escalation of number and impact of cyber attacks, despite the growing value of the cybersecurity market and the increasing efforts of companies and state actors to improve the security of information systems and infrastructures (Technavio 2018). The lack of effective cybersecurity measures has a potential knock-on effect on the information revolution, and on the development of information societies around An early version of this letter has been published here https ://www.wefor um.org/agend a/2019/08/ we-must-treat-cyber secur ity-like-publi c-good/ * Mariarosaria Taddeo

David J. Gunkel was a keynote speaker for “Identity, Agency, and the Digital Nexus”, April 2013, SSHRC funded  international symposium hosted by Athabasca University. His talk challenged the audience to reframe and rethink the “human-machine” binary in 21st century understandings of ethics and agency. Later that year Gunkel talked with Paul Kellogg over Skype to discuss some of the points raised in the presentation, and other key ideas embedded in Gunkel's 2012 publication, "The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots and Ethics." Gunkel is the Presidential Teaching Professor of Communication Studies at Northern Illinois University. The symposium was funded by a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and organized by Dr. Raphael Foshay, MA-IS Program Director at Athabasca University.

As artificial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an artificial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things that are useful to humans will also have the capacity to do things that are harmful to humans and other sentient beings. Theoretical challenges to developing artiticial moral agents result both from controversies among ethicists
about moral theory itself, and from computational limits to the implementation of such theories. In this paper the ethical disputes are surveyed, the possibility of a `moral Turing Test ’ is considered and the computational difficulties accompanying the
different types of approach are assessed. Human-like performance, which is prone to include immoral actions, may not be acceptable in machines, but moral perfection may be computationally unattainable . The risks posed by autonomous machines ignorantly or deliberately harming people and other sentient beings are great. The development of machines with enough intelligence to assess the effects of their actions on sentient beings and act accordingly may ultimately be the most important task faced by the designers of artificially intelligent automata.

This mixed-methods study investigates the hypothesis that playing Defcon, a nuclear warfare simulation game, can affect attitudes toward nuclear weapons and stimulate critical reflection on this issue. Participants were 141 college students who were randomly assigned to game playing (experimental) and article reading (control) conditions. A multivariate repeated measures factorial analysis revealed statistically significant differences between groups for three pairs of pre-/post-test items. In addition, total pre- and post-test scores showed a significant interaction with group assignment, reported frequency of game play, and gender, with women and less frequent gamers exhibiting greater attitude changes. In the second, qualitative phase of the study, 20 additional participants were interviewed to better understand how playing Defcon may stimulate both attitude change and critical reflection about nuclear weapons.

Robot surgery began as a general practice in the
United States in 2000 when the robotic da Vinci Surgical
System was approved for use in hospitals by the FDA.
Recently there have been some questions regarding the
safety record of these machines and their benefits relative
to their expense. Should we as patients and caregivers place
more or less trust in the technology of robotic surgery? To
answer this question we will look at the possibility that
robotic surgery may be an example of reverse adaptation,
where the technology drives the social contract between
the doctor and patient. Additionally, we will look at the
impacts robotic surgery will have on traditional aspects of
the medical ethics of surgery, such as informed consent,
autonomy of surgeons and patients, corporate marketing,
and the duty to provide the best available care, as well as
increasing the asymmetry of the trust relationship between
surgeon and patient. It will be argued that these issues
will grow in importance as future robot surgery systems
gain more autonomy in making or suggesting surgical
strategies.

This lesson is the second of a three-session unit on privacy and information technology. The first session introduced some general considerations in the philosophy of privacy, and how different ethical theories (namely, utilitarianism and deontology) can be used in arguments defending or denying that we all have a moral right to privacy. This lesson introduces further details from privacy regulations in the USA, Canada, and the EU, then asks students to apply these concepts to a specific case in information technology ethics. The lesson is broken into three p arts: [1] Lecture (20 min), [2] Small Group Discussion (40 min), [3] Class Discussion (20 min).

This paper describes a one-day workshop format for introducing ethics into the engineering curriculum prepared at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM). It responds to the ethics criteria newly integrated into the accreditation process by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). It also employs an ethics across the curriculum (EAC) approach; engineers identify the ethical issues, write cases that dramatize these issues, and then develop exercises making use of these cases that are specially tailored to mainstream engineering classes. The different activities and strategies employed in this workshop are set forth. Specific references are made to the cases and exercises developed as a result of these workshops. The paper ends by summarizing the different assessments made of the workshop by addressing the following questions: how did it contribute to the overall ABET effort at UPRM; could other universities benefit from a similar activity; and how did the participants evaluate the workshop?

This is a unique opportunity for early career researchers to join The Alan Turing Institute. The Alan Turing Institute (ATI) is the UK’s new national institute for data science, established to bring together world-leading expertise to provide leadership in the emerging field of data science. The Institute has been founded by the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick and the EPSRC.

This is a targeted call, by which we intend to recruit researchers in subjects currently underrepresented by our fellowship cohort. Fellowships are available for 3 years with the potential for an additional 2 years of support following interim review. Fellows will pursue research based at the Institute hub in the British Library, London. Fellowships will be awarded to individual candidates and fellows will be employed by a joint venture partner university (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL or Warwick).

The pervasiveness of smartphones has facilitated a new way in which owners of devices can monitor their health using applications (apps) that are installed on their smartphones. Smartphone personal health monitoring (SPHM) collects and stores health related data of the user either locally or in a third party storing mechanism. They are also capable of giving feedback to the user of the app in response to conditions that are provided to the app therefore empowering the user to actively make decisions to adjust their lifestyle.
Regardless of the benefits that this new innovative technology offers to its users, there are some ethical concerns to the user of SPHM apps. These ethical concerns are in some way connected to the features of SPHM apps. From a literature survey, this paper attempts to recognize ethical issues with personal health monitoring apps on smartphones, viewed in light of general ethics of ubiquitous computing. The paper argues that there are ethical concerns with the use of SPHM apps regardless of the benefits that the technology offers to users due to SPHM apps’ ubiquity leaving them open to known and emerging ethical concerns. The paper then propose a need for further empirical research to validate the claim.

Data Philanthropy-the donation of data from private companies-is becoming increasing more popular, as corporations, like Genentech and Pfizer1 donate their data, and international organisations, like the UN, start to create the infrastructure to facilitate the sharing of corporate-owned data (Kirkpatrick 2013).

In this paper I will be investigating the ethics of freemium games, microtransactions, and loot boxes.  Three distinctions are relevant here.  First, there is a difference between a fixed-reward microtransaction and a random one, such as a loot box.  In the former, a player knows exactly what she is purchasing and how much it will cost her.  In the latter, a player knows how much she is paying for the loot box, but she does not know what is inside.  Second, there is a difference between cosmetic items and those which affect gameplay; this is particularly pronounced in multiplayer games, where a player might have an advantage over another through the expenditure of real money.  Third, there is a difference between items which are obtainable both for real money and for in-game effort and items which are only obtainable for real money.  Ultimately all three of these distinctions will prove necessary to show that fixed cosmetic rewards are ethically permissible, random rewards of all types are ethically problematic, and fixed functional rewards can be acceptable, but only under certain conditions.

Multi-user online environments involve millions of participants world-wide. In these online communities participants can use their online personas – avatars – to chat, fight, make friends, have sex, kill monsters and even get married. Unfortunately participants can also use their avatars to stalk, kill, sexually assault, steal from and torture each other. Despite attempts to minimise the likelihood of interpersonal virtual harm, programmers cannot remove all possibility of online deviant behaviour. Participants are often greatly distressed when their avatars are harmed by other participants’ malicious actions, yet there is a tendency in the literature on this topic to dismiss such distress as evidence of too great an involvement in and identification with the online character. In this paper I argue that this dismissal of virtual harm is based on a set of false assumptions about the nature of avatar attachment and its relation to genuine moral harm. I argue that we cannot dismiss avatar attachment as morally insignificant without being forced to also dismiss other, more acceptable, forms of attachment such as attachment to possessions, people and cultural objects and communities. Arguments against according moral significance to virtual harm fail because they do not reflect participants’ and programmers’ experiences and expectations of virtual communities and they have the unintended consequence of failing to grant significance to attachments that we take for granted, morally speaking. Avatar attachment is expressive of identity and self-conception and should therefore be accorded the moral significance we give to real-life attachments that play a similar role.

Recent years have seen an influx of medical technologies capable of remotely monitoring the health and behaviours of individuals to detect, manage and prevent health problems.  Known collectively as personal health monitoring (PHM), these systems are intended to supplement medical care with health monitoring outside traditional care environments such as hospitals, ranging in complexity from mobile devices to complex networks of sensors measuring physiological parameters and behaviours.  This research project assesses the potential ethical implications of PHM as an emerging medical technology, amenable to anticipatory action intended to prevent or mitigate problematic ethical issues in the future.

PHM fundamentally changes how medical care can be delivered: patients can be monitored and consulted at a distance, eliminating opportunities for face-to-face actions and potentially undermining the importance of social, emotional and psychological aspects of medical care.  The norms evident in this movement may clash with existing standards of ‘good’ medical practice from the perspective of patients, clinicians and institutions.    By relating utilitarianism, virtue ethics and theories of surveillance to Habermas’ concept of colonisation of the lifeworld, a conceptual framework is created which can explain how PHM may be allowed to change medicine as a practice in an ethically problematic way.  The framework relates the inhibition of virtuous behaviour among practitioners of medicine, understood as a moral practice, to the movement in medicine towards remote monitoring. 

To assess the explanatory power of the conceptual framework and expand its borders, a qualitative interview empirical study with potential users of PHM in England is carried out.  Recognising that the inherent uncertainty of the future undermines the validity of empirical research, a novel epistemological framework based in Habermas’ discourse ethics is created to justify the empirical study.  By developing Habermas’ concept of translation into a procedure for assessing the credibility of uncertain normative claims about the future, a novel methodology for empirical ethical assessment of emerging technologies is created and tested.  Various methods of analysis are employed, including review of academic discourses, empirical and theoretical analyses of the moral potential of PHM.  Recommendations are made concerning ethical issues in the deployment and design of PHM systems, analysis and application of PHM data, and the shortcomings of existing research and protection mechanisms in responding to potential ethical implications of the technology.

Principles of fairness and solidarity in AI ethics regularly overlap, creating obscurity in practice: acting in accordance with one can appear indistinguishable from deciding according to the rules of the other. However, there exist irregular cases where the two concepts split, and so reveal their disparate meanings and uses. This paper explores two cases in AI medical ethics-one that is irregular and the other more conventional-to fully distinguish fairness and solidarity. Then the distinction is applied to the frequently cited COMPAS versus ProPublica dispute in judicial ethics. The application provides a broader model for settling contemporary and topical debates about fairness and solidarity. It also implies a deeper and disorienting truth about AI ethics principles and their justification.

Do we have a right to transparency when we use content personalization systems? Building on prior work in discrimination detection in data mining, I propose algorithm auditing as a compatible ethical duty for providers of content personalization systems to maintain the transparency of political discourse. I explore barriers to auditing that reveal the practical limitations on the ethical duties of service providers. Content personalization systems can function opaquely and resist auditing. However, the belief that highly complex algorithms, such as bots using machine learning, are incomprehensible to human users should not be an excuse to surrender high quality political discourse. Auditing is recommended as a way to map and redress algorithmic political exclusion in practice. However, the opacity of algorithmic decision making poses a significant challenge to the implementation of auditing.

There is a growing interest in the research of malware in the context of cyber-security. In this paper I will present a case study that will outline the curriculum used to teach malware ethics within the context of a computer science course that teaches students malware programing techniques. Issues from computer and information ethics that apply most closely to ethical malware research will be highlighted. The topics discussed in the course will be outlined and assessment techniques will be discussed.

Engineering has a direct and vital impact on the quality of life of people. The services provided by engineers are required to take into consideration the safety, health and welfare of the public. Engineering Ethics is of relevance to the majority of people within the field of computing which has its own particular ethical concerns. Computer Ethics (with Software Engineering Ethics as its subfield) has thus been developed as a specific branch of Applied Ethics. It is important to recognize that prudent ethical judgment is an essential ...

The paper offers an analysis of the problem of integrating ethical principles into the practice of software design. The approach is grounded on a review of the relevant literature from Computer Ethics and Professional Ethics. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section reviews some key questions that arise when the ethical impact of computational artefacts is analysed. The inner informational nature of such questions is used to argue in favour of the need for a specific branch of ethics called Information Ethics. Such ethics deal with a specific class of ethical problems and Informational Privacy is introduced as a paradigmatic example. The second section analyses the ethical nature of computational artefacts. This section highlights the fact that this nature is impossible to comprehend without first considering designers, users, and patients alongside the artefacts they create, use and are affected by. Some key ethical concepts are discussed, such as freedom, agency, control, autonomy and accountability. The third section illustrates how autonomous computational artefacts are rapidly changing the way in which computation is used an perceived. The description of the ethical challenges posed to software engineers by this shift in perspective closes the section. The fourth and last section of the paper is dedicated to a discussion of Professional Ethics for software engineers. After establishing the limits of the professional codes of practice, it is argued that ethical considerations are best embedded directly into software design practise. In this context, the Value Sensitive Design approach is considered and insight into how this is being integrated into current research in ethical design methodologies is given.

Video games are a specific kind of virtual world which many engage with on a daily basis; as such, we cannot ignore the values they embody. In this paper I argue that it is possible to cause moral harm or benefit within a video game, specifically by drawing attention to the nature of the choices both players and designers make. I discuss ways in which games attempt to represent morality, arguing that while flawed, even games with seemingly superficial devices such as morality meters can attempt to promote moral reflection. Ultimately, I argue that the moral status of the actions depends on the effects of those actions on the player herself; if those actions make us less ethical then the actions are wrong. Unfortunately, it is not clear to me that players are always in a position to tell whether this is the case.

Safety-critical systems require the utmost care in their specification and design to avoid errors in their implementation, using state of the art techniques in a responsible manner. To do otherwise is at best unprofessional and at worst can lead to disastrous consequences. An inappropriate approach could lead to loss of life, and will almost certainly result in financial penalties in the long run, whether because of loss of business or because of the imposition of fines. Legislation and standards impose external pressures, but education and ethical considerations should help provide more self-imposed guidelines for all those involved in the production of safety-critical systems. This paper considers some of the issues involved, with pointers to material providing greater depth in particular areas, especially with respect to the use of formal methods.

Information and communication technology (ICT) provides pedagogical benefits in teaching and learning. Likewise, it supports innovative service-learning (SL) as a teaching pedagogy. However, the use of ICT as a support tool in any pedagogical approach poses some ethical issues. This paper explores some ethical issues in the integration of ICT in SL activities. Specifically, this paper describes the ethical issues in using the Internet as a tool in writing SL reflection. This article also explains the ethical concerns in using the web as a tool in SL evaluation. The study employs a review of related literature and a personal interview among service-learners. The ethical issues discussed in this paper include privacy, authenticity of reflection, technology acceptance, reciprocity, informed consent, administration, and methodological alternative. It is concluded that there is a need to seriously address the ICT ethical issues in SL integration.

This thesis studies the enabling properties of ICT and their effects and potential for social change. It primarily builds on interdisciplinary scholarship about the multifaceted co-evolution between the global deployment of ICTs and the emergence of the Information Society, understood as a socio-economic restructuring of capitalism. The thesis also features abundant philosophical insights about crucial aspects of ICT development, applications and management. These include arguments about the different roles of ICTs in extending human communication and in performing or facilitating the remote control of humans and animals, machines and systems operations; about the entanglement between telecommunications, transport networks, urban development and work and organization; and about the relations between ICTs, culture and human values. Examples are offered to illustrate the potential that these empirical and philosophical lessons may have for the construction of a framework for the ethico-political assessment of ICTs. Finally, the annex features a PhD proposal that delineates the next steps that such research would have to take.

This paper put forwards a theory of information ethics based on the concept of an 'information access state'; an information access state is a relation between a person or persons and some information. I argue that this framework is preferable to those theories put forward by Luciano Floridi (2002) and Joroen van den Hoven (1995), because it focuses on the importance of information to persons and it allows for the positive ethical value of both access to information and the denial of access to information. This “information access account” allows us to capture a broader range of practical ethical issues with regard to information than either of these rival theories.

- Result of “the Onlife Initiative,” a one-year project funded by the European Commission to study the deployment of ICTs and its effects on the human condition
- Inspires reflection on the ways in which a hyperconnected world forces the rethinking of the conceptual frameworks on which policies are built
- Draws upon the work of a group of scholars from a wide range of disciplines including, anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, law, philosophy, political science

What is the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the human condition? In order to address this question, in 2012 the European Commission organized a research project entitled The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition. This volume collects the work of the Onlife Initiative. It explores how the development and widespread use of ICTs have a radical impact on the human condition.

ICTs are not mere tools but rather social forces that are increasingly affecting our self-conception (who we are), our mutual interactions (how we socialise); our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and our interactions with reality (our agency). In each case, ICTs have a huge ethical, legal, and political significance, yet one with which we have begun to come to terms only recently.

The impact exercised by ICTs is due to at least four major transformations: the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature; the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks.

Such transformations are testing the foundations of our conceptual frameworks. Our current conceptual toolbox is no longer fitted to address new ICT-related challenges. This is not only a problem in itself. It is also a risk, because the lack of a clear understanding of our present time may easily lead to negative projections about the future. The goal of The Manifesto, and of the whole book that contextualises, is therefore that of contributing to the update of our philosophy. It is a constructive goal. The book is meant to be a positive contribution to rethinking the philosophy on which policies are built in a hyperconnected world, so that we may have a better chance of understanding our ICT-related problems and solving them satisfactorily.

The Manifesto launches an open debate on the impacts of ICTs on public spaces, politics and societal expectations toward policymaking in the Digital Agenda for Europe’s remit. More broadly, it helps start a reflection on the way in which a hyperconnected world calls for rethinking the referential frameworks on which policies are built.

Cloud computing is rapidly gaining traction in business. It offers businesses online services on demand (such as Gmail, iCloud and Salesforce) and allows them to cut costs on hardware and IT support. This is the first paper in business ethics dealing with this new technology. It analyzes the informational duties of hosting companies that own and operate cloud computing datacentres (e.g., Amazon). It considers the cloud services providers leasing 'space in the cloud' from hosting companies (e.g., Dropbox, Salesforce). And it examines the business and private 'clouders' using these services. The first part of the paper argues that hosting companies, services providers and clouders have mutual informational (epistemic) obligations to provide and seek information about relevant issues such as consumer privacy, reliability of services, data mining and data ownership. The concept of interlucency is developed as an epistemic virtue governing ethically effective communicatio...

Secara umum, pekerjaan di bidang TI setidaknya terbagi menjadi empat kelompok: • Kelompok pertama adalah mereka yang bergelut di dunia perangkat lunak (software), baik mereka yang merancang sistem operas, database, maupun sistem aplikasi. • Kelompok kedua adalah mereka yang bergelut di bidang perangkat keras (hardware). • Kelompok ketiga adalah mereka yang berkecimpung dalam operasional sistem informasi. • Kelompok keempat adalah mereka yang berkecimpung di pengembangan bisnis teknologi informasi. Profesi Bidang Teknologi Informasi Software engineer sebagai sebuah profesi tidak semata mengandalkan pengetahuan dalam ilmu komputer saja melainkan interdispliner dari berbagai bidang ilmu yang saling mengisi dan saling mendukung dalam menjalankan tugas. • Bidang ilmu metodologi pengembangan perangkat lunak • Manajemen sumber daya • Mengelola kelompok kerja • Komunikasi • Ilmu komputer (Computer Science) • Teknik rekayasa (Engineering) • Teknik Industri (Industrial Engineering) • Ilmu manajemen • Ilmu sosial (social science) Pekerjaan Teknologi Infor,asi Standar Pemerintah Pranata komputer adalah pegawai negeri sipil yang diberi tugas, wewenang, serta tanggung jawab serta hak untuk membuat, merawat, dan mengemgangkan sistem dan atau program pengolahan dengan komputer.

One of the major concerns in online teaching and learning in distance education context is academic integrity. Technology has made it easy for learners to cheat. While there are efforts to address this concern based on what teachers know, it is also important to take a closer look on how learners do it based on their own narratives. An open ended questionnaire was distributed to the students of the University of the Philippines Open University enrolled in a Computer Ethics course at the graduate level. The course, including the final exam, is fully online. Fifty-two (52) students accomplished the questionnaire. Specific examples of board posts will also be presented to validate student responses. Results of this study will hopefully contribute towards the development of a Learning Assessment System more appropriate to an open and  distance e-learning context.