Legal Protection of Students in the Digital Learning Era: An Islamic Law and Indonesian Positive Law Perspective

Abstract

Digital learning has moved a substantial part of Indonesian education into environments governed by platform design rather than by school rules, exposing students to data processing, electronic sexual violence, bullying, and commercial targeting. Indonesian protective instruments were built for the physical school and for offline harms, and Islamic legal discussion of the duties owed to learners has remained largely ethical. This study identifies the harms that digital learning generates for students, maps Indonesian protective instruments against them, examines the duties Islamic law imposes on those who assume responsibility for a learner, and formulates a framework of protection. The research is normative juridical and doctrinal, using statutory and conceptual approaches, supported by classical doctrine on guardianship, trust, and the prohibition of harm, and by maqasid reasoning. Indonesian law covers the harms unevenly. Sexual violence, including its electronic forms, and the processing of children’s data are addressed by recent statutes; bullying and violence in education are addressed by ministerial regulation; commercial targeting, surveillance by learning technology, and the conduct of unvetted online instructors are substantially unregulated. The educational institution’s position is the weak point: it bears duties under education regulation but its responsibility for harms arising on platforms it selects is undefined. Protection should follow the assumption of responsibility rather than the location of the harm, with institutional duties of selection, supervision, and response stated expressly, and with data minimisation treated as a protective obligation rather than a compliance formality.