Courseware material re-use via model driven Lms platform integration

Abstract

The success of the e-learning paradigm observed in recent times created a growing demand for e-learning systems in universities and other educational institutions, that itself led to the development of a number of either commercial or open source e-learning platforms, as well as of relevant standards (e.g. SCORM). While the usage of these platforms gains recognition and acceptance amongst institutions, two difficulties arise that are directly related to the diversity of available platforms. On one hand, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage or to compare available platforms without additional conceptual tools. On the other hand the growing multiplicity of different platforms is a true barrier to the re-use of existing course material, which is a clear economical concern for the future of these technologies. The present project ambitions to overcome the aforementioned difficulties by using the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach of the Object Management Group (OMG). The goal is to provide a common architectural framework enabling an integrated specification of platform architectures. This platform-independent framework can then be used to specify and classify existing or future Learning management systems (LMS) and to simplify the courseware material re-use from different kinds of e-learning systems.