Collaborative learning using service-oriented architecture: A framework design
Introduction
Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is widely accepted as a new paradigm for delivering useful functionality in a cost effective way. It forms a new trend to be adopted by organizations in mitigating legacy system problems as in to maximize interoperability, reusability, flexibility and cost efficiency. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is suitable for modularization, and the resulting SOA-framework can be used as a basis for implementing specialized e-learning services, specified by future standard frameworks and reference models. Grewal et al. [1] presents a model of Web Services-based e-learning lifecycle. The lifecycle defines all the functionality needed for the interactions between the service provider and the service requester. Many research have identified and created common services, which are essential for the creation and authoring stages of a typical e-learning system.
SOA research has mainly dealt with code reusability in LMS and less on its use for collaborative learning. There is a need to realize the SOA design in the e-learning domain as there is not much implementation done based on the designed models or architectures. For this paper, our scope focuses on designing the scope of services and business processes, which are to be published in the service registry. The business processes are directly dealing with collaborative activities from the consumer (learners’) perspective.
The research questions for this paper are:
- (1)
How can SOA (conceptually and technically) be designed to allow flexible interaction between different components in LMSs in enhancing collaborative learning environments?
- (2)
How can we utilize business process management (BPM) to manage learning processes?
The outline of the paper is as follows: Section 2 presents related works on service-oriented architecture and its benefits to e-learning. Section 3 focuses on related works concerning business process management. Section 4 presents our proposed collaborative learning framework design using a Web Service approach. The paper is concluded in Section 5.
Section snippets
Why SOA?
The typical learning management system is built based on a component-based architecture. However, Web services provide a better alternative as services are loosely coupled and can be subscribed anytime any place. Furthermore, leveraging web standards in an e-learning environment will allow the dynamic integration of applications distributed over the web and encourage reuse of learning objects. An example of the significance of Web services is in the context of collaborative learning. According
BPM and e-learning
Helic [5] discusses the possibilities of using BPM technology for the management of collaborative learning processes. The generic learning processes framework is shown in Fig. 1.
Business process is a set of linked activities that create value by transforming an input into a more valuable output. Typically, e-learning adopts content-oriented, tool-oriented or the task-oriented approach [5]. However, none of these approaches deals with the learning process itself, but addresses only certain parts
Collaborative learning framework design using SOA
The uses of learning objects, which can benefit from SOA, are such as Reusability, Interoperability, Accessibility and Modularization. Thus, different components/learning objects can be implemented as Web services so that the system components and content can be distributed all over the Web, and by different service providers. Section 4.1 explains how the SOA methodology can be used in designing the collaborative learning framework. Further details are provided in Section 4.2.
Conclusion
Many of the collaborative learning systems are mainly based on client-server architectures, which give rise to the problems of poor flexibility, scalability and interoperability. Collaborative learning using service-oriented architecture, which serves as a novel approach in the e-learning domain, helps in distributing the learning content more efficiently and promotes reusability. Most research has not addressed the implementation aspects. This paper has addressed the implementation details for
References (8)
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