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978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27 - 30, 2010, Washington, DC 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference S3J-1

The UNED’s Interoperable Virtual Campus Service Management Architecture

Salvador Ros, Roberto Hernández, Timothy Read, Rafael Pastor, Manuel Castro, Miguel Rodríguez-Artacho,

Antonio Robles-Gómez,

UNED University, Spain {sros,roberto,rpastor,arobles}@scc.uned.es, {tread,miguel}@lsi.uned.es, mcastro@ieec.uned.es,

Abstract - The creation and maintenance of a virtual campus is a task that not only implies the deployment of sophisticated hardware and software but also requires considerable effort in the integration of the main university management systems with the chosen teaching tools present in the campus. Such integration requires the definition of a range of services tailored for the different user profiles. Hence, it has been necessary to develop a management environment for the virtual campus that enables it to be manipulated and controlled in an efficient manner where new services (above and beyond the basic e-Learning platform tools) can be integrated in a seamless fashion. The implementation of these services should guarantee a large degree of interoperability among virtual learning environments, VLEs and tools. To this end, some of these services have been implemented using the IMS Enterprise standard. This standard essentially contributes to the organization of a given e-Learning platform in terms of users, courses and roles therein; leaving to one side the formalization of other services more specific to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) together with the current technological framework. Index Terms – e-learning, standards, evaluation, Learning management systems.

INTRODUCTION The UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a

Distancia) [1] is the only national distance education university in Spain with a virtual campus of approximately 210.000 users (lecturers, tutors and students) participating in almost 2000 subjects, corresponding to the different types of courses (Masters, Degrees, Professional Qualifications, etc.) offered by the university. A virtual campus is defined here to be not only a LMS but also set of services needed for teaching. Furthermore, there are several different services required for course institution and configuration. Clearly this new vision of a virtual campus brings new problems to be addressed. Firstly, it is clear that in this context the administrative packages that are present in the main e-Learning platforms (Moodle, LAMS, Sakai, .LRN, Blackboard, Angel, etc.), [2]-[7] are clearly insufficient for the efficient management of a virtual campus of the scale and complexity mentioned above. Secondly, the tools that

make up these administrative packages do not manage all the information necessary. Hence, it has been necessary to develop a management environment for the virtual campus that enables it to be manipulated and controlled in an efficient manner where new services (above and beyond the basic e-Learning platform tools) can be integrated in a seamless fashion The implementation of these services should guarantee a large degree of interoperability among VLEs and different tools.

A solution to the problem of interoperability in this context is understood as a set of services for teaching and has been implemented in the Campus project initiative [8], [9]. This project focuses on LMS services, and encourages the use of the existing LMS, providing an interoperability layer between LMSs and e-learning tools, and promotes the development of connectors for all types of tools that can be useful for learning. In this sense, UNED's project focuses on interoperability between different LMS and the different services tailored to teaching. These services are adapted to new faculty and staff necessities derived from the Bolonia agreement.

To this end, some of these services have been implemented using the IMS Enterprise standard, [10]-[13]. While this standard was the best available at the time of implementation, the development lacked certain elements necessary for success. Therefore, it was decided that a set of extensions were needed to achieve the objectives here. This standard essentially contributes to the organization of a given e-Learning platform in terms of users, courses and roles therein; leaving to one side the formalization of other services more specific to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) together with the current technological bases [14],[15]. The set of services implemented in the UNED have been classified into four different groups. The classification was made in response to the functionality of the service. So these services can be classified as follows:

• Management services: In this section all services

related to the correct configuration and functioning of a given VLE are included. Examples include: activation, deactivation, modification (and other life cycle changes) of subjects and users for different types of courses.

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• Auditing services: Here all services related to the

recompilation and dissemination of user and performance data from the e-Learning platforms are contained. Such information is of great interest to both the users of the campus, and also the university and its quality control process.

• Information services: These are the services that

provide information that complements what is provided by a given VLE to its users. Example information includes general campus news and messages and also specific reminders left by the course teaching staff.

• Teaching support services: These are the services that

all teaching staff has at its disposition in order to prepare courses for a given VLE. They include a wide range of services such as the personalized preparation of multimedia materials. While such work is obviously carried out by professional design staff that the university has, the management environment controls the petitions made and tracks the workflow inherent in the process. As well as the integration advantages present in this

approach, further advantages are the reduction in the costs incurred and the consistency of the information that can be obtained about the virtual campus and its functionality, together with the way in which precise information necessary for continuous assessment (necessary in the EHEA) can be obtained. These latter points lead to an increase in the quality of the user experience within the campus [13].

This work presents interoperability manager architecture that UNED has developed to organize its virtual campus and the service oriented environment developed for UNED together with the actual definition of the services that have proven to be necessary, thereby offering a clear contribution to the improvement in the way that users can work in a given VLE within the virtual campus. An overview of the UNED’s campus virtual organization model is presented in the next section, followed by a discussion of the different services that are implemented on the architecture in the following one. Finally, some conclusions are presented together with lines of future work being undertaken.

UNED’S VLE ARCHITECTURE AND ORGANIZATION

The infrastructures involved in supporting teaching in

educational institutions are characterized by their great heterogeneity. This situation gives rise to a greater range of maintenance and management problems [8], [9]. Furthermore, such an infrastructure is not appropriate for the creation of new general purpose services oriented toward an institution's strategic goals, especially where quality control and evaluation are important.

Hence, the UNED has developed a software architecture that enables the wide range of its technological infrastructures to be managed, thereby giving support to its education model. Furthermore, it permits the creation of valuable new services in a centralized way. This architecture represents the first step to achieving real world interoperability among the different pieces of educational software. This architecture is based on SOA services, as illustrated in Figure 1.

ADMINISTRATIVE

USERSUSERS

Management Auditing Information Teaching Support

LMS IManagement

LMS IIManagement

LMS I LMS IISTUDENT

INFORMATION SYSTEM

SER

VIC

ESNEW TOOLS

FIGURE 1 UNED VLE ARCHITECTURE.

Figure 1 shows the more important services that users

and institution need to define and how they are connected. There are mainly four services:

• Management service, • Auditing service, • Teaching support service, • Information service,

These services are characterized because they are independent services that are related to different systems on the VLE, including: student information services, SIS, learning management software, LMSs present, etc. At present the integration has been undertaken for one of UNED's LMS.

To get the maximum grade of interoperability between different systems the IMS Enterprise standard has been used. In some cases it has been necessary to extend the definition or define a new structure to support the new services (as was noted in the introduction).

I. UNED’s VLE Operation

The UNED uses two main educative platforms: WebCT [4] and aLF [6]. The latter is based upon the .LRN nucleus and has been designed in house. Currently, aLF is supporting the new courses in the EHEA, following the Bolognia Declaration, with approximately 50.000 students, whereas WebCT supports all the students in the older study plans which are now in extinction (more than 150.000 students). The UNED's virtual campus is made up of nearly 2000

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subjects and (between both platforms) 1500 lecturers and 5000 tutors.

II. The Course Life cycle

The complexity of the UNED's teaching system requires the definition of very strict procedures that ensure the adequate functionality of the virtual campus during the academic year. To implement these procedures it is necessary to use the concept of course life cycle. This concept guarantees the structure of the virtual campus virtual in different academic years. The life cycle of a course is defined by five chronological parameters: • Maintenance start date, MST. • First term subjects start date, FTSSD. • Second term subjects start date, STSSD. • First term forum closure date, FTFC. • Second term forum closure date, STFC.

Using these parameters it is possible to describe the

dynamic nature of the virtual campus. A virtual course starts at maintenance start date (MST). Between this date and FTSSD, faculty are involved in the actualization of all the subjects (first term and second term). Before reaching the MST date, a backup of courses is made and all the users except faculty staff are removed from the campus, whereupon subsequently, course content is updated. At the FTSSD date, all the students and tutors are enrolled into their courses. Once this stage has finished, the academic course is said to have begun and the first term started.

The next step begins at STSSD date. At this time all students and tutors are instantiated in the second term courses. Once all student evaluation of the first term courses has finished, at the FTFC date, all corresponding institutional forums are closed automatically. The structure of these forums reflects the university's territorial organization, i.e., the UNED has more than seventy four regional study centers where tutors undertake their tutorial work with their assigned student groups. Hence, each tutor has a forum in the university platform where they are able to work with their students. Of the 80 forums that are typically active for a given course, 90% of them correspond to activity in the regional study centers. Obviously the maintenance of these forums must be undertaken automatically.

At this point the second term starts and the virtual campus is not significantly modified until the STFC date, the only changes being the incorporation of new students to the campus. The chronological determination of the life cycle of a virtual campus depends upon the decisions taken by the given institution. Since these parameters affect all kinds of courses (undergraduate, Masters, Ph.D., etc.), in whatever platform they may be housed, it is necessary for them to be interoperable. Some of these data can be explicitly represented by using IMS Enterprise but not all of them. Others require an extension that refers to the life cycle. Such an extension has the format shown in Figure 2.

FIGURE 2

XML SCHEMA DEFINITION OF A LIFE CYCLE This fragment of XML together with the data which

IMS Enterprise can represent is sufficient to enable this process to be managed adequately.

This use of the life cycle here guaranties the reusability of all subjects in a dynamic way, since the different subjects are always active in the VLE, even if they have a different status depending on the chronological information. Furthermore, it establishes a institutional organization of the courses within the VLE.

UNED’S VLE SERVICES

I. Management services

All the different courses in the UNED can be defined as an independent sub-campuses in the VLE. Each of them are characterized by their life cycle. Hence, it is possible to manage any sub-campus in an easy way. All of them use the same basic procedures such as: creating, deleting and modifying courses, enrolments, removal of students, faculty and tutors.

The management service can perform these operations independently of the platform, by using the individual APIs of the different LMSs and tools.

These services are using all the information they need from the UNED student information systems [16]. The interchanges between these systems and the VLE systems are made using IMS enterprise and the proposed extensions and all of data are stored in a local VLE database that is actualized on the less resources demand periods. Also it has defined two more services: One of them is the starting VLE and the second is the subject profile definition.

. Starting the VLEs

This service enables the UNED VLE systems to be started in an automatic mode where a person without specific formation can supervise the process. This process is guided using the course lifecycle information Subject profile definition

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The methodology used in the UNED defines how virtual courses should be used and what tools are available for that purpose. Given that it is very important to guarantee that all courses have the same minimum number of available tools, a course template was specified. This also enables students to find a similar structure in different courses that makes it easy for them to work online.

It was also necessary to add a further extension to the metadata to represent the basic structure of a course. This extension defined the initially active tools that were available to the teaching staff. Furthermore, for all official courses, the structure of forums that would be available was also specified, as shown in Figure 3.

FIGURE 3

SUBJECT PROFILE XML SCHEMA DEFINITION.

Thus, the management service maintains all the necessary information to customize the virtual campus. Using this XML schema each LMS receives the information necessary for their own management system generates the courses.

II. Auditing Services

It was evident from the beginning that quality control processes were needed together with information about the way in which the courses were running on a given e-Learning platform and the participation of the different types of users. Such control is essential in the EHEA and its strict policy on user participation. Hence, it was necessary to define services that permitted the state of a given virtual campus to be monitored. Such control also had to reflect the set of institutional quality control indicators that the university had established. To this end an auditing service was developed that was able to log all information. This service was incremental in the sense that information was accumulated in time, as a given campus was used. Currently this service holds a valuable archive of information dating back four years.

The UNED is able, therefore, to undertake detailed information about the way different courses have been run during this time regardless of they were created. Such an analysis is able to compare and contrast a wide range of data related to different indicators. In total there are 33 different indicators recorded by the system relating to six different types of user within a given e-Learning platform. As can be appreciated, it is possible to undertake many different studies on the way that teaching/learning has evolved over time and the way in which the different roles have changed.

In Figure 4 a fragment is presented from an example course from the Computer Science degree, showing the month of November 2009

. Given this information it is possible to generate three types of reports: • A report on an entire study plan within the university,

which provides information about the success and problems it has had.

• A report on a given subject that can be used to determine its use by students, tutor and faculty.

• A report about the way in which a given regional study centre has performed (defined in terms of the role of its tutors and students).

It should be noted that this kind of information is not

captured by the IMS standard, and as such, has had to be specified by the extension detailed above. Once these modifications were included it was easy to collect the same information from different e-Learning platforms.

The structure of a report in this context is shown in Figure 5.

FIGURE 4

33 SUBJECT EVALUATION PARAMETERS.

III. Teaching support services

The objective of an institution like the UNED is that its courses make use of the formats and tools that available for online distance learning from its e-Learning platforms. In order to achieve this objective it is necessary to overcome

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the digital divide that still exists among some of the lecturers with these resources. Consequently, a support service has been developed to help with the production of digital media and resources for online courses, [17],[18]. Lecturers are therefore able to ask for the preparation of some specific digital resources or the incorporation of a particular tool. Once a request has been received it is logged in the task management system in the support section and is tracked until it is finished. Associated information is also logged about the task so that it can be correctly classified.

Furthermore, a service has been implemented to handle problems that are identified with the virtual campus. Once a problem has been registered in the system the corresponding section within the UNED that handles this type of problems is automatically notified so that it can be resolved as soon as possible.

FIGURE 5 AUDITORY XML SCHEMA DEFINITION

IV. Information Services

Finally, IT services has developed various information services. These services were created to manage the notification of changes in the virtual campus and its courses to the respective members of them and to provide information that complements what is provided by a given VLE to its users [19].

FIGURE 6

SUBJECT ACTIVITY REPORT.

In Figure 6 a subject activity report is presented. This report gives some information to faculty about the news on their subjects e.g. new forums entries, new mail, and so on. This service is programmable and the lecturers will receive an email periodically summarizing any changes in their courses.

Furthermore, UNED’s VLE includes general campus news and messages and also specific reminders left by the course teaching staff.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS

UNED has developed an architecture needed to face future challenges in the e-learning environment. This architecture is based on standards and SOA services to guarantee the interoperability among different systems. It has been presented in terms of a set of services that UNED considers necessary to control and evaluate their VLE activity. These services have been tailored for the different user profiles.

One consequence of using this architecture has been the reduction of incidents in the creation of courses in the virtual campus. Nowadays, there is 0.1% of incidents registered in the virtual campus over the total number of users.

It also has ensured that faculty has information about the use that students and tutors make of their courses. This information is obtained from the different LMSs and the various servers and tools used.

On the other hand, the university can determine the performance of their faculty and tutors in the virtual campus

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and therefore has a clear measure of their dedication to the various teaching tasks. This development work represented a major effort in analyzing the operating procedures of the institution in various areas such as teaching and systems. It has also needed considerable effort to reorganize the systems that support the campus.

However, this initial effort has been rewarded because it allows both the faculty and institutional demands to be handled in a simple and comprehensive way.

Nowadays, UNED is finishing the integration of the second platform in the architecture presented in this paper. Furthermore, it is expected that the new e-learning paradigms involve the definition of new services e.g. virtual laboratories. Hence this type of campus organization opens different chances to develop new architecture paradigms based on Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. All current development efforts are centred on the development of real personal learning environments based on these new technologies. The adequacy of the system to the new specifications LTI / LSI IMS standards is also being studied.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors would like to acknowledge European Union Leonardo Project 142788-2008-BG-LEONARDO-LMP mPSS – mobile Performance Support for Vocational Education and Training Project and to Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation the project TIN2008-06083-C03/TSI “s-Labs – Integración de Servicios Abiertos para Laboratorios Remotos y Virtuales Distribuidos”. Also We thank Comunidad de Madrid for the support of E-Madrid Network of Excellence S2009 TIC-1650.

REFERENCES

[1] UNED. http://www.uned.es. Marzo 2010

[2] http://www.sakaiproject.org. Marzo 2010

[3] http://www.moodle.org. Marzo 2010

[4] http://www.blackboard.com. Marzo 2010

[5] http://www.lamsinternational.com. Marzo 2010

[6] http://www.dotlrn.org. Marzo 2010

[7] http://www.angellearning.com. Marzo 2010

[8] Santanach, F, Vila,J.G, Gener, M, “CAMPUS architecture”. http:// campusprojet.org

[9] Santanach, F “The Campus Project: e-learning tools and platforms integration”http://campusproject.org

[10] IMS Global Learning Consortium. 2003. IMS Abstract Framework: Applications, Services, and Components. Version 1.0. IMS GLC http://www.imsglobal.org/af/afv1p0/imsafascv1p0.html

[11] IMS Global Learning Consortium. 2006. IMS Tools Interoperability Guidelines. IMS GLC, Inc.. http://www.imsglobal.org/ti/tiv1p0/imsti_guidev1p0.html

[12] IMS Global Learning Consortium. 2004. IMS Entreprise Specification. IMS GLC, Inc. http://www.imsglobal.org/es/index.html

[13] IMS Global Learning Consortium. 2002. IMS Entreprise Service. IMS GLC, Inc.. http://www.imsglobal.org/enterprise/index.html

[14] Pastor R, Read T, Ros S, Hernández R et al.”Virtual communities adapted to the EHEA in a enterprise distance e-learning based environment”. Congreso: 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. San Diego USA, July 2009.

[15] Weller, M. “ Virtual learning Enviroments”. Routledge 2007.

[16] Pastor R, Ros S et all “Arquitectura Open-Source para la Gestión de Servicios de Aprendizaje y Colaboración”. I Jornadas sobre las TIC en la UNED.2005.

[17] Ros S,Pastor R, Gonzalez J.B “.El Campus Virtual de la UNED: organización y apoyo al docente” IV Simposio Internacional de Tele Educación y Formación Continua. Cuba 2007.

[18] Ros,S, Boticario J G , Pastor, R,, Rodríguez-Artacho, M, “Un modelo de organización para la producción de cursos virtuales”. I Jornadas sobre las TIC en la UNED. Madrid 2005.

[19] Ros S, Pastor R., Gonzalez J.B.” LAS TIC EN LA UNIVERSIDAD DEL 2010” Seminario de integracíon Regional de la Educación Superior en América Latina. Cartagena de Indias Colombia 2007.

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Salvador Ros, Lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education. IEEE Senior Member. sros@scc.uned.es Roberto Hernández, Lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education. IEEE Senior Member. roberto@scc.uned.es Timothy Read. Lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education. tread@lsi.uned.es Rafael Pastor. Lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education. rpastor@scc.uned.es Antonio Robles-Gómez Assistant Lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education. arobles@scc.uned.es. Manuel Castro, Professor at the Spanish University for Distance Education. IEEE Senior Member. mcastro@ieec.uned.es. Miguel Rodriguez Artacho Professor at Spanish University for Distance Education. IEEE Senior Member. miguel@lsi.uned.es