Toward a Service-Oriented Architecture for e-Learning

(Dr.) Timothy K. Shih 施國琛 National Central University, Taiwan

Neil Y. Yen 嚴譽文 Waseda University, Japan

2011 Tsinghua-Intel Transparent & Cloud Computing Summit

Evolution of Historical Development

• Practical Systems – Courseware Authoring Tool

– Learning Management System

– Repository

– Ubiquitous Learning Support System (or Applications)

• Core Techniques – Intelligent Mechanisms

• Smart Search

• Multimedia Streaming

– Automated Mechanisms • content prefetching

• asynchronization downloading

– …

Cloud Challenges - at a glance -

• Data Governance – creation & receipt, distribution, disposition, …

• Service Manageability – decomposition, aggregation, reuse, …

• Process Monitoring – real-time history analysis and mining

• Availability & Reliability – service lifecycle, retrieval, application, …

• Visualization Security – resource & information exposure, …

Today - three major issues -

Seamless Support Integration

Today - three major issues -

Seamless Support Integration

with the focus on service interoperability

Integration - strategy -

• The Learning Tools Interoperability

– a common interface for web service

– resources exchange simply through a package

• Major Components

– Proxy Tool

– LTIR (Learning Tool Interoperability Run-Time)

• Session/Security Management

• Deployment Service

• Configuration Service

• Launch Service

• Outcome Service

Integration - implementation -

1

2

3 4

MINE HardSCORM Authoring Tool

MINE Learning Management System

Features

• no specific definition is required

• easy to be maintained and extended

• always available and searchable

• seamless, stateless and extra resources free

Integration - companions -

… to be added

Today - three major issues -

Seamless Support Integration

with the focus on operation suggestions

Support - -

the story starts from …

Support - general scenario -

Support - general scenario -

Support - our scenario -

1. search for the local/global handler system 2. metadata matching 3. locate the target resources 4. retrieve the resources and reuse

However, there are 23,000 learning resources out there in our repository.

Support - motivation & purpose -

• About Learning Resources

– No objective benchmarks

• subjective usage experience is required

• resources cannot be compared

• characteristics are missing

• Discovery and Reuse Learning Resources

– follow specific specifications (e.g., SCORM)

– Think about next move or … moves

• Comprehensive Understanding

• Plan the Search

… an integrated approach to facilitate the search process and enrich the search experiences

Support - implementation -

• Showcase - 1

suggestion(s) to user’s query

potential template to lecture organization

… 10 more features out there

Support - preliminary implementation -

• Showcase - 2

suggestion to course organization

suggestion to supplementary resources

suggestion to course content (to be added)

Features

• time-series information for highlighting significant portions of learning resource

• progressive suggestions corresponded to the query

• search result expansion based on selected resource (i.e., intelligent lecture template)

• adaptive re-ranking result considering the working items

• intelligent search path concerning the real-time collective intelligence mining and query analysis

Today - three major issues -

Seamless Support Integration

with the focus on service transition

Seamless - concept -

• A simple consideration

• Services are not activated separately but they should

understand what/when the follow-up is.

– determine the next potential service(s)

• pre-download the resource and its related information in the repository while

performing searching

– setup connection and proceed communication

single service with helps comprehensive support in an integrated service

Seamless - our scenario -

HardSCORM Authoring Tool

Learning Management System Repository Cloud

- private / public -

End-User Device(s) - iOS / Android -

Seamless - preliminary implementation -

implemented on MINE LMS, iPad, iPhone and HTC Desire HD

Special Thanks

2011 Tsinghua-Intel Transparent & Cloud Computing Summit

Yaoxue Zhang (Dr.)

Tsinghua University, China

Yuezhi Zhou (Dr.)

Tsinghua University, China

Jianhua Ma (Dr.)

Hosei University, Japan

Qun Jin (Dr.)

Waseda University, Japan