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
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Dipl.-Inform. (FH), M.Sc. Markus Schmid
Prof. Dr. Reinhold Kröger
Beteiligte ausserhalb der Hochschule
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Dr. Jeanne Stynes (Cork Institute of Technology)
Kooperationspartner
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Cork Institute of Technology, Cork, Ireland
Laufzeit
Beginn: November 2001
Ende: Juli 2004
Veröffentlichungen
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M. Schmid; J. Stynes; R. Kröger: "Architektur einer dienstebasierten,
personalisierbaren Laufzeitumgebung für Lernumgebungen", 1. GI
e-Learning Fachtagung Informatik (DeLFI 2003), September 2003
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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]
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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.
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