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Open Service-Oriented Platforms for Personal Learning Environments

Salvador Ros, Roberto Hernández, Antonio Robles-Gómez, Agustín C. Caminero, Llanos Tobarra, and Elio Sancristobal RuízSpanish University for Distance Education

Learning management systems (LMSs) are software systems for administrating,

tracking, and reporting on e-learning programs. The authors’ third-generation

LMS provides a personal learning environment (PLE) in which LMS functions

are integrated into a context that users are familiar with and use for other

purposes — that is, mashup platforms that use gadgets. By modularizing LMS

functionality as a collection of services, the system lets users select the services

they want, use services from multiple providers, and mix their learning with

other activities in a more natural manner.

L earning management systems (LMSs) are software systems for admin-istrating, tracking, and reporting

on e-learning programs. LMSs enable content assembly and delivery; support classroom, self-guided, and collabora-tive learning; and automate grading and grade reporting. The logical evolution of IT has also affected these systems, which could help users to dynamically define learning contexts. Researchers are implementing and testing these advances on what’s being called the third generation of LMSs.1

We can characterize the three LMS generations using several properties, including interoperability, communica-tion, methodology, and learning experi-ence (see Table 1).2 The first generation encompasses ad hoc proprietary solu-tions and focuses on content distribution.

This generation is associated with the concept of computer-aided instruction systems. Such learning systems are self-contained and allow for little to no communication or interaction between students and teachers.

The second LMS generation is based on so-called classroom-based learn-ing systems, which provide centralized learning from content distributed by lecturers. These systems enable com-munication between instructors and students and employ various technolo-gies to support learning activities. Most current e-learning platforms belong to this second generation, and some have gained institutional acceptance — for example, commercial platforms such as Blackboard (www.blackboard.com), and open source platforms such as Moodle (www.moodle.org), Sakai

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(www.sakaiproject.org), and dotLRN (www .dotlrn.org). Because IT systems are dynamic, all these platforms’ architectures allow exten-sions,3 such as Blackboard Building Blocks, WebCT Powerlinks, Moodle Modules, and Sakai Technology Portability Profile tools.

However, these platforms are independent and aren’t reusable in different environments. Despite their obvious contributions, they offer a homogeneous experience of the learning con-text4 while remaining centralized and closed. Users can’t customize their own learning envi-ronments, and a noticeable shift occurs from the learning environment to their day-to-day one.

Third-generation LMSs are service-oriented, letting users easily create individualized and reusable learning contexts.5 They also use open Internet standards to enable lightweight interoperability. These features make this gen-eration of learning platforms user-centered. Here, we describe an implementation of a third-generation LMS aimed at personal learning environments (PLEs). In such environments, the learning experience is improved by the creation and use of individual contexts. This allows for considerable methodological flexibility and could establish a new paradigm of virtual courses. Such courses could be viewed as mash-ups comprised of educational services from the LMS and a set of third-party services.

Building a Third-Generation LMSOur LMS implementation has three main char-acteristics. First, it lets users (for example, students) immediately integrate new tools, functionalities, and technologies into a learning environment. Second, users can reuse available tools, including those from existing institu-tional LMSs and third parties. This creates a more symmetric learning context based on communities of practice. Third, our implemen-tation provides an environment in which learn-ers can customize their learning context and mix learning with other day-to-day activities. Meeting these objectives requires shifting from

a centralized, closed architecture to a distrib-uted, open one, thus modularizing the LMS into a collection of services. In a service-oriented platform, a clear, formal framework initially defines the services (see www.e-framework.org and www.imsglobal.org). Based on these formal framework descriptions, several proposals exist for implementing service-oriented platforms. In all of them, a central management system acts as the core of the learning platform and can orchestrate (with different levels of complex-ity) the LMS’s services. Charles Severance and his colleagues propose a solution in which the LMS is at the design’s center.3 The European Role project (see www.role-project.eu) and the Muñoz-Organero proposal5 are devoted to cre-ating widgets and gadgets for integration into LMSs. However, in these cases, the LMSs are still isolated, and their services aren’t exposed, indicating that an asymmetric relationship exists between learners and lecturers.4 The LMSs aren’t open, nor can users reuse func-tionalities by equipping their work spaces with institutional tools.

To achieve LMS modularization, we must implement services on the LMS side using Web services technologies and deliver them to a cli-ent platform as gadgets that users can select from a gadget library. Gadgets are dynamic Web content that can be embedded in a web-page. Gadgets can be added to Web contain-ers and interact strongly with them. Examples include iGoogle and Orkut. In our work, we’ve created new services based on the services of the Spanish University for Distance Education’s (UNED’s) institutional LMS. We orchestrated these services to construct a set of gadgets that third parties can employ without restriction, provided they’re students enrolled in a course. The following gadgets were in production at the time of writing:

• My Tasks notif ies students about their assigned tasks and gives them direct access to their assignments.

Table 1. The three generations of learning management systems.

Generation Interoperability Communication Methodology Learning experience

First None None Self-contained Self-contained

Second Content plugging and add-ons

Enrolled student-instructor

Teacher-centered Homogeneous

Third Content and tools Service-oriented

All student-instructor User-centered Heterogeneous

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• My Communities/Subjects lets students know the communities and courses for which they’re registered and access them directly.

• My Active Forum lets students choose a forum in which they can participate.

• My Forum gives students information about forums that they can access directly.

Using this set of gadgets, we can define PLEs for both students and lecturers in their favor-ite OpenSocial-compliant containers, such as iGoogle, Orkut, or Hi5. We can also define vir-tual courses as mashups of gadgets in which students and faculty choose the services that are most appropriate for their work.

Figure 1 illustrates a learning environment, created in iGoogle, for a “Management and Administration of Network Services in Operat-ing Systems” subject. In this example, a lecturer has created a personal environment with gad-gets students can use to access the forums and collect information from them. The lecturer has enriched this environment with two gadgets that are external to the institution — namely,

Google Calendar and Google Docs. As the fig-ure shows, institutional gadgets can coexist with the student’s own gadgets. Only students enrolled in the course can access this environ-ment. Lecturers can observe their students’ per-formance because all information is recorded in the institutional LMS monitoring tools. Stu-dents can easily share this environment with others enrolled in the course and can also design their own environments, but the lecturer can still monitor them.

Open Mashup ArchitectureAn open mashup architecture requires that ser-vices be published in such a way that users can easily discover and consume them. Figure 2 shows our proposed architecture. Each ele-ment of the functionality layer is understood as a Web service; thus it isn’t essential to have access to the entire LMS Web container just to use its elements. Any Web container can have tools that allow institutional control without the need for a new environment. This approach lets us make institutional resources available to

Figure 1. Personal environment within iGoogle for a computer systems subject. This environment gives access to students enrolled in the lecturer’s course and lets them share third parties’ gadgets.

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Open Service-Oriented Platforms for Personal Learning Environments

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students in their usual work or leisure environ-ments. With this service-oriented methodology, we can consider the LMS to be an open system.

The LMS continues to be at the core of the e-learning architecture, but now users can view some institutional LMS tools — such as forums, courses, and tasks — as services that they can find, use, and orchestrate on the net-work.5 So, users can use a second-generation LMS (such as Blackboard, Moodle, or DotLRN), provided that they can deploy the LMS tools as Web services.

The development process for creating PLEs based on an open mashup architecture requires two different subsystems: server and client. The server subsystem acts as an interface for access-ing relevant data inside the e-learning platform. The solution we chose is to use REST Web ser-vices, which let users implement a flexible and interoperable platform interface because such services are easy to develop, and their execu-tion is light-weighted for the server workload. Moreover, REST services are bound to HTTP and are stateless, allowing atomic operations.

The client subsystem is based on gadgets that are composed inside a mashup page, so students can create their own PLEs. The Open-Social standard (www.opensocial.org) lets us create gadgets that most current mashup plat-forms can employ. Once each gadget is imple-mented, it must be registered in the mashup environment so students can include it on their main pages. The registration process requires uploading the gadget XML definition file to the mashup platform. In our example, we chose iGoogle as a mashup environment because of its widespread use and usability.

Most Internet browsers incorporate a secu-rity mechanism that restricts the number of connections to the same server and TCP port that serve a given webpage. This is an impor-tant restriction to developing mashup applica-tions. The solution is to use a proxy that routes client requests toward a service provider, con-figures use policies, and forwards message heads and cookies. The proxy also checks and validates the retrieved data. Additionally, it’s entrusted with avoiding security problems such as cross-site scripting, in which a third party injects JavaScript code inside a webpage that a user has visited to bypass the page server’s security policies. Figure 3 shows our service architecture.

EvaluationWe’ve implemented and deployed a PLE system that uses our architecture at UNED. This PLE underwent a testing phase and is expected to be used for UNED’s 200,000 students in an upcom-ing course. During the testing phase, we collected

Figure 2. Open mashup architecture. The different learning management system (LMS) tools are exposed as Web services, and different personal learning contexts are defined based on Web services.

Tools

Web

con

tain

erCore

Learning management system

Webservice

Webservice

Webservice

Web containerWeb container

Figure 3. Framework for opening up the institutional learning management system (LMS) to iGoogle. Web containers use institutional gadgets and REST/JSON to communicate with the proxy. The framework also accepts third-party gadgets and different communication protocols.

Proxygadgets

REST/JSON

REST/JSONCookie institution

Webcontainer

Client

Webservices

Externalgadgets

LMS

Differentprotocols

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information about our prototype’s usefulness and ease of use. We used UNED’s institutional LMS survey tools, so only students enrolled in the university could take the survey, after being authenticated. We administered questionnaires to 150 students enrolled in post-graduate and graduate programs in the Faculty of Computer Science, Psychology, and Law. The criteria we used to choose the survey questions followed guidelines from previous work and let us mea-sure the technology’s acceptance in terms of perceived utility and ease of use.6 Students gave responses based on a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). Because our analysis is qualitative, the sample size wasn’t a problem because opinions repeat frequently after a low number of questionnaires.7

Table 2 shows the survey results. We observed that students thought the prototype increased learning. In particular, they believed that set-ting up a virtual course with institutional and external gadgets really helped improve learn-ing. Most respondents believed that the proto-type helped them to stay active and motivated because it let them combine both learning and leisure activities.

Regarding the perceived ease of use, we can see that students believed the system was easy to use, and that its f lexibility let them adapt it to their work habits. In addition, students scored the ability to include external gadgets highly because it improved both productivity and learning. Most students liked being able to share gadgets with others.

N ext-generation PLEs point the way to more customizable LMSs that are open for exten-

sion and better integrated with users’ day-to-day activities. Our initial results show the positive acceptance for such systems in terms of utility and usability. However, some challenges remain: one is maintaining security when sev-eral parties are adding new services and gadgets in a learning context that can be easily shared. Another significant challenge is automatically defining e-learning contexts. For this purpose, researchers must define reference models (ontol-ogies or taxonomies) that will let users discover services (gadgets at the client side; Web services at the server side) and combine them to build more complex services or select them depending on the learning context.

References1. D. Dagger et a l. , “Serv ice-Or iented E-learning

Platforms from Monolithic Systems to Flexible Ser-

vices,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 11, no. 3, 2007,

pp. 28–35.

2. G. Piccoli, R. Ahmad, and B. Ives, “Web-Based Virtual

Learning Environments: A Research Framework and

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Skills Training,” MIS Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 2001,

pp. 401–426.

3. C. Severance, J. Hardin, and A. Whyte, “The Coming

Functionality Mash-Up in Personal Learning Envi-

ronments,” Interactive Learning Environments, vol. 16,

no. 1, 2008, pp. 47–62.

4. S. Wilson et al., “Personal Learning Environments:

Challenging the Dominant Design of Educational

Table 2. Student satisfaction with the prototype.

Question (Q) 1* (%) 2 (%) 3 (%) 4 (%) 5 (%)

(Q1) The system helps me to improve my skills within the subjects for which I use it. 6.7 16.7 20 33.3 23.3

(Q2) I will be able to increase my learning productivity if I use the system. 6.7 6.7 26.7 20 40

(Q3) I think that using the system, which is based on both external and institutional gadgets, improved my learning.

3.3 — 10 40 46.7

(Q4) This system helps me to keep active and motivated since I can combine both my learning and leisure activities.

6.7 16.7 10 13.3 53.3

(Q5) In general, using the system increases my learning. 6.7 — 23.3 36.7 33.3

(Q6) The system’s design and provided information is clear and easy to understand. 13.3 3.3 6.7 46.7 30

(Q7) The system’s flexibility lets me adapt it to my work organization. — 6.7 13.3 33.3 46.7

(Q8) The system’s flexibility lets me easily add new external gadgets. — — 6.7 13.3 80

(Q9) The system’s flexibility lets me easily share gadgets with other users. — 6.7 6.7 20 66.7

(Q10) If some problem appears within the system, it will be easy to solve. 3.3 13.3 16.7 43.3 23.3

(Q11) In general, I think the system is easy to use. — 6.7 — 30 63.3

*1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree

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Open Service-Oriented Platforms for Personal Learning Environments

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Systems,” Proc. European Conf. Technology Enhanced

Learning (EC-TEL 06), 2006, pp. 173–182.

5. M. Muñoz-Organero, P.J Muñoz-Merino, and C. Kloos,

“Personalized Service-Oriented E-Learning Environ-

ments,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 14, no. 2, 2010,

pp. 62–67.

6. F.D. Davis, “Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of

Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology,”

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7. R.R.B. Johnson and L.B. Christensen, Educational Research:

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Publications, 2007.

Salvador Ros is an associate professor in the Control and

Communication Systems Department at the Spanish

University for Distance Education (UNED) and a vice

dean of technologies in UNED’s School of Computer

Science. His research is in learning technology and its

application to learning processes, including service-

oriented platforms, learning analytics, and multimodal

learning environments. Ros has a PhD in engineering

from the Industrial Engineering School at UNED. He’s

a senior member of IEEE and a member of the advisory

board for STEM — Horizon 2012. Contact him at sros@

scc.uned.es.

Roberto Hernández is an associate professor in the Con-

trol and Communication Systems Department at the

Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED) and

the dean of UNED’s School of Computer Science. His

research is in learning technology and its application

to learning processes, including service-oriented plat-

forms, learning analytics, and multimodal learning

environments. Hernández has a PhD in sciences from

UNED. He’s a senior member of IEEE. Contact him at

roberto@scc.uned.es.

Antonio Robles-Gómez is an assistant professor in the Con-

trol and Communication Systems Department at the

Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED).

His research interests include quality-of-service sup-

port in distributed systems and development of infra-

structures for e-learning. Robles-Gómez has PhD in

computer science from the University of Castilla-La

Mancha, Albacete, Spain. He’s a member of IEEE.

Contact him at arobles@scc.uned.es.

Agustín C. Caminero is an assistant professor in the Con-

trol and Communication Systems Department at the

Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED). His

interests include quality-of-service support in paral-

lel distributed computing systems and development

of infrastructures for e-learning. Caminero has a PhD

in computer science from the University of Castilla-

La Mancha, Albacete, Spain. He’s a member of IEEE.

Contact him at accaminero@scc.uned.es.

Llanos Tobarra is a lecturer in the Control and Communi-

cation Systems Department at the Spanish University

for Distance Education (UNED). Her interests include

security support in distributed systems and the analy-

sis of social networks for e-learning. Tobarra has a PhD

in computer science from the University of Castilla-

La Mancha, Albacete, Spain. Contact her at llanos@

scc.uned.es.

Elio Sancristobal Ruíz is an assistant professor in the

Electrical, Electronic, and Control Department at the

Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED).

His research interests include learning technologies

and research in remote lab applications. Sancris-

tobal Ruíz has a PhD in engineering from the Indus-

trial Engineering School at UNED. Contact him at

esancristobal@ieec.uned.es.

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