Towards the Establishment of a Reference Architecture for Developing Learning Environments
Ellen Francine Barbosa, Maria Lydia Fioravanti, Elisa Yumi Nakagawa, José Carlos Maldonado · 2013
Learning environments are moving away from monolithic applications towards more open, flexible components, capable of interoperating with other learning components. In spite of the diversity of learning environments, there is a lack of uniformity regarding their basic functionalities. Thus, the establishment of core functionalities represents an issue to the development of these environments. In a different but related perspective, reference architectures have emerged as an alternative for promoting reuse of design expertise and facilitating the development of systems. Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) has also arisen as a promising software development approach, contributing to a better Separation of Concerns (SoC). Motivated by this scenario, in this paper we discuss the establishment of EDUCAR, an aspect-oriented reference architecture for developing learning environments. EDUCAR has been constructed by means of a systematic development process. As a consequence, architectural requirements, concepts and crosscuting concerns regarding the learning environments domain have been established as well. The results achieved from a preliminary evaluation of EDUCAR suggest the adequacy of the proposed architecture with respect to the learning environments domain. Keywords-learning environment; reference architecture; aspect-oriented software development