Date of Award

2004

Document Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

Masters of Science (Research)

Department

Cork Institute of Technology

First Advisor

Dr. Jeanne Stynes

Second Advisor

Dr. Reinhold Kroger

Abstract

This work develops a service-based architecture for an extensible and customisable learning management system (LMS) runtime environment. The architecture mainly defines interfaces for the interaction of functional system components represented by loosely coupled distributed services. Services that represent functional components of the distributed LMS are called e-leaming services. In addition, underlying infrastructure services provide supportive functionality such as service-lookup within an institution. Users access the system using an LMS portal component that acts as a front-end for the LMS services.

While existing e-leaming environments provide a relatively good coverage of most of the functional requirements defined in this work, they usually exclude the personalisation and collaboration areas particularly addressed in this work. The e-leaming environment is modelled as a distributed architecture with the functional components represented by a collection of more or less independent services. Our architecture tries to standardise core interfaces for services belonging to different classes. These interfaces may be further extended by service vendors in order to support enhanced features.

The main aims of the architecture are cross-service personalisation of the resulting run-time system and support of institutional collaboration. The architecture focuses on modularity, configurability and extensibility of the LMS services and supports institutional cooperation by allowing remote-access to LMS services.

Access Level

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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