The deployment
of an academic middleware to support advanced learning services
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 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. There are two main
research areas that are looking at the problem each from their own perspective:
the learning technology area and the network technology area. The first is
working mainly on standards and best practices for the delivery of on-line and
distance education. Efforts include the description of learning objects with
metadata, the description of learners with profiles and the generic depiction
of learning technology systems in terms of information systems architecture.
Recently deployment issues are increasingly of concern to this research
community. Inevitably the research is moving towards an area of work 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. 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 each from their own perspective: the learning technology area and the
network technology area. The first is working basically on standards and best
practices for 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 work 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
the technical director of the GRNET directory service. He 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
international conferences and journals and he has been technical director of
the Greek national directory services program. He is currently lecturing at the Department of Product and Systems Design, University of the
Aegean, Syros (PD407/80) and also working as a
research associate for the
“Aegean-Net” network service and the GUARDIANS project.
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. He is a
member of the Organising Committee of the Dept of Product and Systems Design,
University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece. 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 the Acting Head
of the Department of Product and Systems Design, University of the
Aegean, Syros, 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.