A Service-Based Architecture for Learning Management Systems
Transcription
A Service-Based Architecture for Learning Management Systems
Labor für Verteilte Systeme FH-Wiesbaden http://wwwvs.cs.hs-rm.de/projekte/service-based-LMS.pdf A Service-Based Architecture for Learning Management Systems Beteiligte an der Hochschule • • Dipl.-Inform. (FH), M.Sc. Markus Schmid Prof. Dr. Reinhold Kröger Beteiligte ausserhalb der Hochschule • Dr. Jeanne Stynes (Cork Institute of Technology) Kooperationspartner • Cork Institute of Technology, Cork, Ireland Laufzeit Beginn: November 2001 Ende: Juli 2004 Veröffentlichungen • M. Schmid; J. Stynes; R. Kröger: "Architektur einer dienstebasierten, personalisierbaren Laufzeitumgebung für Lernumgebungen", 1. GI e-Learning Fachtagung Informatik (DeLFI 2003), September 2003 • Schmid, Markus: "A Service-Based Architecture for Learning Management Systems which Supports Personalisation and Collaboration", M.Sc. Thesis, Cork Institute of Technology, Irland, April 2004 (Link) [../downloads/extern/pubs/thesis/schmid04.pdf] • M. Schmid; J. Stynes; R. Kröger: "A Distributed Architecture for Learning Management Systems Supporting Institutional Collaboration", Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), Norfolk, USA, World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications (ED-MEDIA 2004), Editors: L. Cantoni; C. McLoughlin, ISBN: 1880094533, Juni 2004 Kurzbeschreibung Current e-learning standards and specifications mainly define content/data exchange between different LMS platforms. Usually, they assume a file-based data exchange in between different systems. Naturally such a procedure is relatively unflexible, and vendors of existing, proprietary and monolithic LMS platforms do not provide direct API access for system Seite: 1 Labor für Verteilte Systeme FH-Wiesbaden http://wwwvs.cs.hs-rm.de/projekte/service-based-LMS.pdf users. However this could provide the basis for both, a more sophisticated LMS collaboration and a user based personalisation of the underlying LMS platform. This work develops a service-based architecture for an extensible and customisable learning management system (LMS) runtime environment. The architecture mainly defines interfaces for the interaction of functional system components represented by loosely coupled distributed services. Services that represent functional components of the distributed LMS are called e-learning services. In addition, underlying infrastructure services provide supportive functionality such as service-lookup within an institution. Users access the system using an LMS portal component that acts as a front-end for the LMS services. While existing e-learning environments provide a relatively good coverage of most of the functional requirements defined in this work, they usually exclude the personalisation and collaboration areas particularly addressed in this work. The e-learning environment is modelled as a distributed architecture with the functional components represented by a collection of more or less independent services. Our architecture tries to standardise core interfaces for services belonging to different classes. These interfaces may be further extended by service vendors in order to support enhanced features. The main aims of the architecture are cross-service personalisation of the resulting run-time system and support of institutional collaboration. The architecture focuses on modularity, configurability and extensibility of the LMS services and supports institutional cooperation by allowing remote-access to LMS services. Part of the M.Sc. project is a protypical implementation of the distributed LMS architecture. Several e-learning and infrastructure services have been implemented. Partially the implementation relies on existing functionality, partially services have been implemented from scratch. The prototype has been successfully integrated into an existing LMS portal, replacing the portals security functionality with the LMS security services. Seite: 2