Konstantopoulos M., Spyrou T., Darzentas J.
Department of Information and Communication Systems,
University of the Aegean, GR 83200 Karlovassi, Samos, Greece,
Email: {mpk, tsp, idarz}@aegean.gr
The rapid development of the significance of digital and human networks in academic institutions, the development of
vocational and distance learning methods and systems and their associated services delivery have modified the organizational and informational structures of academic institutions. In this new
scenario, management information systems, various learning resources in printed or digital format and network related user services are usually competing for their acceptance in a rapidly changing
system. There is an emerging need to provide new services in order to function in a changing international market, to prepare for the expected student mobility and the increasing diversity of
educational needs. This paper argues for the introduction of academic middleware to speed up the delivery process of the new services and reduce the complexity of the managed systems.
Keywords: Middleware, Learning Technology, User profiles, Learning Objects, Directory services.
Technology and economy are the two main driving forces behind
the acceleration in the transformation of present day on-line education delivery. Technology is enables the delivery of new types of educational services. Computer networks are the main tool for the
introduction of these new services. The most basic effect of networks, is that education is rapidly transformed from location based to
distance online based [20]. This affects both the roles the participants play, and the organisations involved. New entities enter the education arena such as information technology experts and commercial producers of educational software. Economically, organisations are investing on human intellectual capital and training organisations are discovering the “corporate learning industry” [8]. The need for life-long vocational training, the growing
trend for student exchange, the on growing demand for interdisciplinary studies, are all parts of the move away from traditional education based on either the acquisition of a degree or the student
being tied to a specific institution. The promotion of autonomy has become accepted as a goal
in the education of children and adolescents [23] and the network technology with its benefits and disadvantages [29] promotes this tendency.
Organisations are rethinking their modus operandi based on these facts. Popular courses are offered under
franchise to others [1], a growing number of institutions are participating to student exchange programs [10,27], and the introduction of distance learning programs is a common policy both for
academic institutions and other learning organizations. A number of strategies are being called into play within this online environment, where geographical constraints are lifted, and where
increasingly, the emphasis is upon individualised courses of learning rather than standardised offerings from institutions. This is particularly true in training organisations [28].
For instance, programmes of study are being offered which are modular in construction with increasing flexibility as to how students combine modules
within a discipline, or select modules across disciplines to gain a combined qualification e.g. a vocational/academic qualification.
Clearly the most important new element that has arisen is
inter-institutional communication. Student exchange, learning modules franchise and inter-institutional degrees necessitate systems that will facilitate the communication [11]. Apart from the alleged
need for integrated information systems to support the institutional organisational and educational components (user network services, learning technology systems, institutional management information
systems), there is an augmenting need for any such system to be scalable and adaptable to a complex globally expanding environment [4].
There are two main research areas that are looking at the problem from their own perspective: the learning technology area and the network technology
area. The first is working basically on standards and best practices on the delivery of on-line and distance education. Efforts include the description of learning objects with metadata [3,19,16], the
description of learners with profiles [12] and the generic description of learning technology systems in terms of information systems architecture [13]. Recently deployment issues are increasingly of
concern to this research community [14,24,25]. Inevitably the research is moving towards an area of research where already major effort is under way. This is the part of the networking community that
is working on the definition and leverage of middleware services.
The middleware term was initially used in a software engineering context [6], but currently its major use can be considered to relate to the network
services deployment area tying together networks and services. Moreover the setup of middleware communities [http://www.internet2.edu/middleware, http://www.terena.nl/middleware] dealing with deployment issues of such services indicates that middleware services are more complex than protocol definitions. While still no
consensus can be reached on the services, which must be considered “middleware”, there are some that are the common denominator. Such services are common place in present day organizational
information systems but more work is required on the definition of a common inter-organizational framework. While both these areas of research are moving quickly to standardize and implement their
work, there seems to exist a gap in the establishment of a surrounding environment for the initiation and acceptance of these standardization
efforts in the working place, in this case educational institutions and those dealing with education delivery.
This paper argues that need for the specification of middleware to support the new functions of the educational community. The next section presents the
problem area and summarises the requirements for the emerging educational services of the future. Section 3 gives an overview of the technology advancements regarding the areas of the learning
technology and networking middleware services. Section 4 sketches a future implementation based on the results of previous works on the areas. Finally,
conclusions and future directions are given in section 5.
The educational sector is directly connected with the developments on the societal environment. The provision of education cannot be considered
outside this context. Summarizing the essential changes in the educational sector the following facts are beyond doubt: the economical landscape is rapidly changing. Apart from the privatisation of a
large portion of the educational sector, there is a growing need for life-long learning. The “new economy” demands a highly educated working force with up to date knowledge [7]. This fact is
changing the clientele –and consequently the programme - of educational institutions. The network reality is offering new tools for the delivery of life-long learning programs with substantially
reduced costs [4]. The provision of an integrated service for both the traditional and distance learners with equally attractive programs of studies and the possibility to swap from location based to
distance on-line based or modularise (personalise) the programme of study, is been requested from increasingly competing educational institutions. Finally the instructional materials are steadily more
reliant on the use of learning technology. Computer labs, networks, digital learning environments and systems are all considered indispensable tools for the delivery of knowledge.
The main application areas of the near future are believed to be:
· The
introduction of distance learning programs as part of the regular studies in an institution.
· The
need for further modularisation of the study programme in order to offer customised degrees and enhance student autonomy.
· The
development of inter-institutional programs
The main technological infrastructures that exist in a typical institution presently are:
· One
or more custom management information systems that contain student records, financial data etc.
· One
or more distance learning programs
· A
campus network and associated user services
Recent researches indicate that of the competing learning institutions in this area, the successful ones will be those that
manage to offer new services, while satisfying quality criteria applicable to a number of processes and entities like course development, faculty training, student services, learning resources,
infrastructure, and outcomes assessment. A set of benchmarks [27] to evaluate the quality of the distance-learning programs in the US were better satisfied by an integrated information system. For
example the benchmarks on “Student Support” and “Faculty Support” presupposed that the institution as an organisation – with its infrastructure - is directly related with the delivery of the
courses (e.g. “Electronic security measures are in place to ensure the integrity and validity of information” or “Support for building and maintaining the distance education infrastructure is
addressed by a centralized system”)
In this situation where the complexity of the system steadily increases and where the network based, global, inter-institutional
services are continuously gaining importance the introduction of an institutional middleware would:
In the learning technology area there are efforts oriented towards the promotion of interoperability between the different
learning systems and the management of pedagogic elements. Therefore standardisation is directed to those components that can be considered reusable and therefore possessing commercial value (like the
learning objects) or those components that are essential for the provision of the new services (like the profiles of users / learners). While there is mobility in other areas too, like the generic
learning technology architecture, the student identifiers, and the learning environments, the above mentioned information (learner profiles and learning material) is considered central to the
educational procedure [21].
The pedagogic elements (or learning materials) are the digital informational content to be provided to the students. In this
field, there are some very advanced efforts on the design of learning materials metadata. The most widespread of these are the IEEE’s Learning Resource Metadata [17], Ariadne [3] and IMS [18,19].
These efforts have led the technology in the area and have produced metadata object schemas. The design of these specifications was based on the possible uses of the learning resources as part of
learning systems. In this way noteworthy categories of the LOM schema are the Educational category that “groups the educational and pedagogic features of the resource”, and the Rights category
that “groups the features that deal with the conditions of use for the resource” [16]. On the other hand the learner profiles in IEEE are described by PAPI [12]. The PAPI specification divides
learner information into four types: personal information, such as names, phone numbers, addresses, etc, preference information, such as whether the learner prefers video over just plain text, performance information: referring to the learners’
achievements in the context of learning environments (digitised or not) and finally, portfolio information, referring to the record of student achievements in terms of skills acquired, and abilities.
On the networking side, the main research or areas include the provision of an intermediate service between the network and
the application level, basically for the deployment assistance of distributed applications. In this context the main effort has been given to the development of infrastructure on directories and PKI
(Public Key Infrastructure) in order to support functionalities (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting) and application on QoS (Quality of Service), Active networks, Distributed data management,
information sharing, or GRID [9]. While much emphasis has been given in this research to the support of academic research, little effort has been paid to the provision of education especially in the
new context earlier described. However the development of a wide scale –global- directory service as a crucial component for the provision of any user related distributed service affects the
provision of education also. This is especially true now, that technology is unifying operating systems, mail servers and web server user records, and the trend is to expand these directories in order
to store profiles and define access rights for as many applications as possible running in a digitised system [5,26].
The speed, with which technology is moving, points to a situation where student records would be some kind of operating system user records [22]. This appears the most likely since the directory
services protocol and corresponding implementations of it are moving in this direction, not just for educational organizations but for any kind of organisation, and especially those that are
multi-national and globally distributed. It is now accepted that a well-established directory service offers a stable and tested environment for the purposes of storing and manipulating, among other
things, education provision related records.
Middleware is not a simple collection of protocols. The notion of a middleware contains also the provision of a service. Therefore middleware is not
considered as a set of interfaces but system components with functionality. Thanks to the middleware technologies, these services have the ability to scale globally [31]. A definition states [2]
“Middleware can be viewed as a reusable, expandable set of services and functions that are commonly needed by many applications to function well in a networked environment". A typical
application can be considered the provision of educational services over or using the network.
Research is ongoing for the integration of learning environments with organizational middleware services. In this context
the GESTALT project produced a demonstrator of a resource discovery service (RDS) with retrieval mechanisms on metadata [15] combined with portable student records using a Directory Services model
[30].
The objective of GESTALT was to design and implement an open online learning environment by
bringing together and enhancing the results of previous projects and creating an integrated trial system, which encompasses the whole of the delivery of online learning from searching for learning
courses and resources, enrolling on and following programs of study delivered over networks, and providing mechanisms for passing information between various parts of the system in a secure and
trusted manner.
Figure 1 The overall GESTALT Functional
Architecture
Figure1 summarizes the GESTALT functional architecture. From one point of view, central to such a system are considered the user profiles and the asset management system.
These are the two main stores for the learner and educational content data. User Profiles hold user preferences for interaction (e.g.
preferred language) with the Learning Environment (LE), with the Resource Discovery Services (RDS) and other information such as personal portfolio and performance data. The Asset
Management System controls access to added value resources, for example course/module data, which could be accessed at an extra cost program of study. This subsystem also publicizes learning
objects (i.e. course module data) to the Resource Discovery Services.
Although not shown in the figure, other components like the RDS, the LE and the administration component have or can have
their own directories holding information specific for their functions but not of direct interest to the other components. GESTALT indicated that in order for the various learning environments and
brokerage services (like the RDS) to be capable to interwork - and to cooperate on the data exchange -which is crucial in order to add value to their services - the definition of common descriptions
of the exchanged data is required. Moreover such descriptions must be integrated in the information systems of the related parties (e.g. academic institutions) and should be incorporated in a wider
context managing related chunks of information. This work is now been undertaken by a new project GUARDIANS (Gateway for User Access to Remote Distributed Information and Network Services).
The problematic areas of the researches presented in the previous section can be summarised in the following:
An answer to go some way to resolve the problem and give boost to both areas is the development of an academic middleware
that will be based on existing middleware efforts of the “networkers” and has as objective the learning technology. The vital questions are: What should such a middleware contain? And how should
the middleware be constructed?
As Aiken et al. [2] noted, “the better approach would be to consider middleware as an unstructured, often orthogonal,
collection of components (such as resources and services) that could be utilized either individually or in various subsets”. Stretching this hypothesis, middleware is considered to be a set of
components placed horizontally in the academic information infrastructure. Middleware is not a new product but rather a new service. The academic middleware, like all others, should contain the most
common data, components or functions of the systems. This way this new service can become central to the intra-institutional information system. As was previously analysed the main information to be
manipulated by such a component must be the learner (student, client) information and the module and learning content information from which the learning programs or qualifications or degrees are
constructed (figure 2).
Figure 2 Systems and services in connected
with middleware
The problem of how the middleware should be constructed is directly related with the direction of the deployment of network
middleware services. It is highly probable that directory services will play a central role. It is also required that such middleware will inherit implemented best practices by other middleware
initiatives like the student identifiers, AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting) and QoS schemes. The degree of interdependence between the two areas of research will depend by the
applications that will exploit this new framework.
The possible scenarios of use of the academic middleware are perhaps the best indication of the level at which academic
middleware will assist the deployment of new academic services:
·
Provision of common middleware services for the educational procedure. For example, distance based programs connected with learning
technology environments with QoS and AAA directly applied.
Figure 3 Users and the Inter-institutional
Middleware
As these new services show the development of a middleware will affect both the communication of components in the
intra-institutional and inter-institutional environment. This dual nature of the middleware services require their deployment to take into account the international standards and practice.
The ideas discussed in this paper concern the implementation of middleware infrastructure with learning technology.
Middleware as a notion is tied with the network technology. It is expected that the significance of middleware services will increase correspondingly with the development of distributed, network based
services. Widely implemented middleware will greatly reduce the complexity of developing worldwide services.
Education, and especially academic education is an application area where new technologies are usually originally
introduced. Future development of services based on networks, using these either on the inter-institution relations or the institution to learners relations is a need deriving from the economical and
social environment. While the deployment of these services will require a wider consensus between the related parts, the definition of a technical context in the conceptual level is the idea of this
paper.
Developing a middleware enclosing the learners and the learning materials, may be the first step in an effort to release the
learners from the restricting frontiers of single institutions and for reusability of the learning materials on a global scale. Of course the significance of such a middleware, like all network
related technologies will increase in parallel with its adoption by the related parties. However, efforts such as IMS in US and Prometheus in Europe show wide commitment from both educationalists and
educational service suppliers to implement commercially viable, interoperable systems.
This work has been partly supported by the European Union through the IST Programme (ACTS Project GUARDIANS Gateway for User
Access to Remote Distributed Information and Network Services) and the GRNET (Greek Research Network) S.A..
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Michalis Konstantopoulos
is a PhD candidate in the department of Information and Communication Systems, University of the Aegean, Greece. He has an MSc and a Degree in Information Systems from the Department of Informatics,
Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece. He has worked in several national and European projects and participated in the authoring of proposals, technical reports and research papers
published in national conferences and international journals. He is currently working as a research associate for the “Aegean-Net” network service and he is technical director of the Greek
national directory services program.
Thomas Spyrou is
a Lecturer at the Department of Information and Communication Systems, University of the Aegean, Samos, Greece. He has participated to many research projects, funded nationally and by the European
Union. He is a member of the Greek National Research Network (GRnet), the Greek Universities Network (GUnet) and Greek National Educational Network (EDUnet) technical committees. His current research
interests include Intelligent Systems, Information Systems, Systems Thinking, Simulation modelling, Information Systems Security, Knowledge Management in Decision Aiding and Support Systems, Human -
Computer Interaction Modelling, Intelligent agents and Distance and Life long Learning.
Professor John Darzentas (MSc
Sussex, PhD London UK, Docent of the Abo Akademi, Finland) is Head of the Department of Information and Communication Systems, University of the Aegean, Greece and Visiting Professor, University of
Athens. He has collaborated in and led many research projects, both in the UK and Greece as well as projects funded by the European Community, on a range of subjects, including Systems Thinking;
Decision Support; Simulation; Knowledge Management; Human Computer Interaction; Design; and Learning Technologies. He is author of a substantial number of papers in scientific journals and books.