An effective services framework for sharing educational resources

Abstract

Nowadays, the growing number of software tools to support e-learning and the data they rely upon are valuable resources, supporting different aspects of the complex learning and teaching processes, including designing learning content, delivering learning activities, and evaluating students’ learning performance. However, sharing these educational resources efficiently and effectively is a challenge: there are many resources, these have not been described accurately and in general they do not interoperate, and it is common for the tools to rely on different technologies. This thesis explores a solution – a novel educational services framework – to improve the sharing of current e-resources, by applying the latest service technologies in the context of higher education. Our findings suggest that the proposed framework is effective to deal with the technical and educational issues in resource discovery, interoperability and reusability, however, there are still technical challenges remaining for implementing this service framework. This research is divided into 3 phases. The first phase investigates the sharing of elearning resources through a literature survey, and identifies limitations on current developments. In the second phase, the current problems relating to resource sharing are addressed by a proposed educational service framework, which contains both educational and technical components. Through a case study, nine e-learning services and their dataflows are identified. To determine the technical components of the framework, a novel Educational Service Architecture is proposed, which allows resources to be better described, structured and connected, by following the principles of discoverability, interoperability and reusability in service technologies. In the third phase, part of the framework is implemented and evaluated by two studies. In the first study, users’ experiences were collected via a simulation experiment, to compare the effectiveness of a service prototype with that of the use of current technologies. During the second part of the evaluation, technical challenges for implementing the services framework were identified via a case study, involving the implementation of another service prototype