Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Support for the production of accessible
educational material and compilation of
best practices
fying concepts, axioms and relationships within a
particular problem domain, and is independent of
specific standards, technologies, implementations,
or other concrete details.
In this case, we are defining a general open
and standard-based framework to support the de-
velopment of accessible and personalized services
for HE institutions that accommodate existing
and future ICT services. In order to respond to
accessibility needs, it has been pointed out the
possibility of using frameworks (understood as
reference models) to support the development of
accessible e-learning. This approach facilitates the
development of a common understanding of the
components of the domain and their interfaces,
and provides a map for service development
(Seale, 2006). In a more technical way, a relevant
initiative is the E-Framework for Education and
Research, which attempts to scope what services
could be useful for educational and research in-
stitutions to make use of information systems and
digital technologies. As the core of this initiative,
a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is proposed
in order to create systems that are independent
of a particular software implementation and can
theoretically be reconfigured to take account of the
complexity of different organizational demands.
Combining both ideas (i.e. understanding
the requirements for accessible e-learning and
the technological support provided by SOA) our
framework for HE institutions aims to provide in-
clusive and personalized services. The framework
is based on standards and facilitates the integration
of the institutional services that deal with the man-
agement of the learning process with e-learning
systems (i.e. LMS) that are focused on the learn-
ing process itself. This conceptual framework is
also an implementable software architecture (see
next section), which can be used to increase the
accessibility and personalization of existing LMS
and the availability of end-user services for HE
institution members. The framework is based on
SOA for supporting the personalization approach
to accessibility.
Support the authoring of learning tasks that
will be eventually performed by many dif-
ferent learners in various settings
Reporting of qualitative and quantitative
reports remarking on predefined assess-
ment features from the course execution
(e.g. reports will include, for instance,
what type of students have had problems in
a particular learning task, or the percentage
of learners goals that have been successful-
ly achieved in a specific learning situation,
in a course, or even in a study program)
Definition of services workflow for man-
agement activities
Finally, the institution itself has to provide or-
ganizational services, such as enrolment, personal
counselling and exam adaptation. As mentioned
above, the required support for these services
has impact for the learner and the staff services.
In this context, we propose a framework built
on a standards-based adaptive and accessible
open source web service oriented architecture
(SOA) that considers standard-based designs and
recommendation strategies. This architecture fol-
lows the full life cycle of service provision and
accommodates to existing and futures services
available in HE.
The Framework for HE Institutions
Generally speaking, a framework is a basic con-
ceptual structure used to solve or address com-
plex issues. Following OASIS (2006), abstract
frameworks are defined by a reference model
that is used for understanding significant relation-
ships among the entities of some environment. It
enables the development of specific reference or
concrete architectures using consistent standards
or specifications supporting that environment. A
reference model consists of a minimal set of uni-
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