Technical Approach
The ENN-ICS architecture – full support of the learning content life cycle through open standards
The target groups of the ENN-ICS project are
students, patients, medical doctors, general practitioners, nurses and the
general public. They all have specific information needs, different
pre-knowledge and different technical equipment available.
Additionally, both users and authors of the ENN-ICS project are located
in different countries.
The technical approach has to consider these circumstances and has thus
to provide for easy to use interfaces, different areas according to the
user groups and to ensure access independently from where the user is
located. That's why ENN-ICS employs an internet based approach having
the WWW as the main user interface. This reduces complexity and have
the user only deal with a single front-end - a web browser.
To achieve low total costs of ownership (TCO) for the ENN-ICS approach
and to ensure a high degree of maintainability open source software and
open standards, like XML, SCORM, and LOM,
are employed wherever possible. Combined with the performance and
security of the Oracle Database as well as the Oracle Application
Server 10g an innovative software system had been built.
ENN-ICS portal - an umbrella component
The portal as an umbrella component based on Apache Lenya is the users’ access to all the other components which, by using the common ENN-ICS look and feel, create a virtual presentation layer. In the back end and transparent to the user the components reside on different servers throughout the world and might exchange information with one another. The different services provided by the ENN-ICS project are mainly based on three components: the Authoring System, the Content Management System (CMS) and the Learning Management System (LMS). In addition, questionnaires to validate the learning contents and a discussion forum are offered. To seamlessly integrate these components the portal offers a Single Sign On (SSO) functionality to not confuse the users with different logons and passwords for the respective services offered to them.
The Authoring System – user-friendly creation of learning contents
International recognised experts will author the
contents which requires a decentralised authoring system. However, the
quality of the contents has to be assured and common guidelines and
style guides have to be followed while creating or adapting content. A
centralised editor will take care of these issues and upload the
contents of the different authors into the CMS.
With the Authoring System authors create, edit and/or reuse all the
contents, which will finally be presented to the end-users (learners).
However, the integration of the Authoring System, the Content
Management System and the Learning Management System is by intention
not realized in a fully automatic way. The reason for this is primarily
determined by quality management aspects. The Authoring System itself
is a network of decentrally installed client software such that every
author has the tool installed on his or her computer. This way authors
are given the maximum amount of freedom. For installing and updating
the clients we are using the technique of Java WebStart.
Authors create, edit and/or reuse contents wherever they are even not
having access to the internet. Once the authors finish editing they can
upload the contents into the CMS. They also have the possibility to
send the contents to an editor first, have the editor make a first
quality check and the editor would then check in the contents. When
contents are being imported into the CMS it is checked for compliance
with the XML schema defined. In other words it is checked whether the
standard for interoperability is met. If not, the user receives
detailed error messages. Otherwise the contents will be stored within
the CMS. The integration between the two systems hence is
semi-automatic and requires user interaction. The direct feedback to
the user ensures the quality of contents within the system and guides
the user in providing content that complies with the standard defined
for this interface within ENN-ICS.
The Content Management System – Managing learning contents on top of the Oracle XML DB
In the publishing process the management of the
learning content is an important task that lies in between creating
and/or modifying contents and making them available to the learners via
the LMS. The ENN-ICS project uses the XML standard to describe the
learning contents. They are modularized in defined levels to achieve a
high degree of reusability, a prerequisite for saving production costs.
In order to reach a high degree of performance the XML contents are
stored in an object-relational manner using the Oracle XML DB.
The CMS interacts with the authoring system through check-in and
check-out mechanisms. Less a feature of traditional content management
systems by themselves is the content transformation. However, in the
context of ENN-ICS the transformation of XML contents to SCORM 2004
content packages is needed for publishing the contents in the LMS.
Instead of having a separate application for that the functionality for
creating SCORM 2004 content packages from selected content items shall
be smoothly integrated into the user interface of the CMS. In the
background, the necessary HTML and IMS control documents of the SCORM 2004 content packages have to be created using ENN-ICS specific XSLT-stylesheets.
As the ENN-ICS project is a trans-European project authors and editors
using the CMS are of different nationality speaking different
languages. Thus, the user interface for the CMS is multilingual. But
not only the authors and editors speak different languages. The same
applies for the users of the contents: the customers of the LMS. As a
consequence, the learning contents are available in multiple languages.
Hence, the CMS is able to manage different language variants of a
learning object knowing that these variants all belong to one and the
same learning object.
People working with the CMS usually have different tasks to fulfill and
thus look to the CMS from different angles. There are specialist
authors playing an important role in the learning matter within his or
her domain. In contrast, there are pedagogues with a high level of
competency in creating instructional courses. Thus, the CMS offers a
strong user role concept. CMS users are assigned to the roles
administrator, editor and author.
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The Learning Management System – Presenting learning contents with full SCORM 2004 compatibility
The LMS provides courses to users tailored
according to their needs and their pre-knowledge which might be
different between students, patients, nurses or GPs. In addition, a management
tool is offered, able to deal with the life cycle of courses in
organizations. Thus, the LMS covers the whole course life cycle, from
the moment a course is uploaded to the system, till the moment the
course is closed, passing through: launch course, assign tutors, open
registration to trainees, accept registrations, monitor trainees etc.
ENN-ICS consortium could require buying contents from other content
providers or could want to disseminate courses produced to other
organizations, using other learning management systems. ENN-ICS decided
to bet for the “de facto” standard SCORM, and specifically for its last
version SCORM 2004.
Date: 2006-11-01
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