On the enterprise modelling of an educational information infrastructure

In this report, we present the outcomes of exercising a design trajectory in respect of the modelling of an educational information infrastructure. The\ud infrastructure aims to support the organisation of teaching and learning activities, independently of any particular didactic policy. The design trajectory focuses on capturing invariant structures of relations between entities in educational organisation into Enterprise object models that underlie the design of the intended educational infrastructure.\ud An early-developed prototype of the infrastructure has emphasised the need for an Educational Model Space to determine the modelling and problem domain context apriori to modelling. In this space, educational requirements have been elaborated towards the Open Distributed Processing (ODP) Enterprise Viewpoint object models expressed in terms of the Unified Modelling Language (UML).\ud Recursive structures have been used to capture the dynamic needs of education. Furthermore, these structures are uniform for the planning, performance and evaluation activities of education. The Enterprise models developed can be used to derive the Information Viewpoint models and to further optimise the prototype of the infrastructure. In this work, we have managed to fruitfully combine educational and computer science modelling inputs by using ODP and UML as a bridge for this interdisciplinary collaboration

Tele-education Process Modelling supported by the ODP Enterprise Viewpoint Language

This paper reports on applying the ODP enterprise viewpoint in the domain of tele-education. The work is conducted as part of a research activity that aims at designing a tele-education system to support planning, execution and evaluation of dynamic distributed educational processes. We explore the ODP enterprise viewpoint as a basis for communication and co-operation between educational scientists and ODP systems designers involved in the design process. Our application of the enterprise viewpoint involves four main steps. First, an educational language is proposed to describe educational processes in generic terms. Second, a set of appropriate enterprise language concepts is selected. Third, a relationship is established between the educational language and enterprise language concepts. Fourth, an educational process is modelled in terms of an entity-oriented model and a behaviour-oriented model. It is hoped that the experience gained in this exercise will provide useful feedback to both the educational and ODP communitie