Hi Fred and the metadata list,
For those who haven't met me yet I'm Sam Easterby-Smith, and have
recently joined CETIS to work on the ELF.
Lorna forwarded this to me:
> I had a quick look at the e-learning Framework home page
> (http://cetis.ac.uk:8080/frameworks), as I'd never heard of the
> project before, and couldn't make head nor tail of the introductory
> blurb. Could someone in the know explain, in lay terms, what this
> project is about and what it's supposed to produce? TIA.
Yes indeed, the introductory blurb on the site is not exactly clear -
i'll look into tidying it up. Meanwhile it looks like you will have
seen a range of explanations including my own presentation from the EC
sig - I've also done a slightly revised summary, the text of which is
below.
I hope this helps, and look forward to seeing you all soon.
Cheers,
Sam
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eLearning Framework - Summary
The ELF is an attempt to create a ‘service orientated’ factoring of the
components and services which make up Managed Learning Environments,
eLearning applications, portals and other user agents.
At present, systems in use in universities are large, complicated
things and are generally unable to work with each other nicely – for
example an institution’s VLE may not be able to communicate with the
SRS or a home grown assessment system may not be able to talk to a
commercial repository…
Rather than have these giants battle for supremacy, the aim of the
framework is to split the monoliths into small discrete ‘services’
which can happily send each other messages and ‘consume’ or make use of
other services' functionality.
The services are represented in a tiered manner, so things which are
unique to education (such as Assessment or Curriculum) are within the
Learning Domain Servicesand services which are of a more general nature
(eg Chat or Searching) are treated as Common Services. The actual user
agents may consume a variety of services to make up their individual
functionality.
The ultimate aim of the Framework is, for each identified service, to
be able to reference an open specification or standard that can be used
to implement the service, and also to be able to provide open-source
implementation toolkits such as Java and C# code libraries to assist
developers.
The intention is not to provide a blueprint for an open-source
solution, but rather to facilitate the integration of commercial,
home-grown, and open source components and applications within
institutions and regional federations, by agreeing common service
definitions, data models, and protocols.
---------------------------
Sam Easterby-Smith
Standards Implementation Support Officer
CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards)
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/
Bolton Institute
Deane Road
Bolton BL3 5AB
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 07957 432 004
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