Innovative design issues of a distributed e-learning environment
Victoria Myroni, Andreas Pombortsis, Vasilis Maglaris · International Journal of Innovation and Regional Development · 2010
The rapid rate of technological change on Web based education will produce a global education economy in which institutions will face competition on a global scale. Educational organisations should be flexible in order to succeed. The scope of this paper is to present a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to facilitate educational online activities in the context of an e-university. Our aim is to construct a set of interoperable network services that conform to appropriate standards. A key challenge is the integration of previously ill-defined services into existing e-university platforms and the ability to adapt their behaviour to new requirements. The main contribution of this paper is a framework composed of loosely coupled components, according to IMS specifications. The proposed environment is based on predefined modules for available services, using SOA concepts and workflows. The ultimate goal of our framework is to enable an efficient mechanism for the searching, identification and delivery of educational content, tailored to specific end user profiles.