SHARING LEARNER INFORMATION THROUGH A WEB SERVICES-BASED LEARNING ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

This paper introduces the architecture developed for the exchange of learners model information among elearning systems in the AdaptWeb Project. This Web-learning environment offers an adaptive content associated with a particular student’s profile. Hypermedia teaching applications may explore different educational strategies and tactics, including guided navigation, hierarchical contents presentation, examples, exercises, and so on. Also the teaching task can be optimized if the teacher prepares a content material that can be shared for different target public. AdaptWeb was designed concerning these aspects and allows the generation of different presentations from an ample learning material developed for a specific discipline based on the learner model. The Web Service technology is used as it yields an easy communication between Web-applications through the HTTS protocol allowing also secure personal data interchange. Our goal in this work is to provide a standard communication protocol that makes possible different e-learning systems cooperate in order to gather a set of learner model information, richer than that found in a standalone e-learning system. As result, the course content, in a compliant federated e-learning system may be better adapted and presented to students, according to each student’s program, cognitive characteristics, and navigation preferences. Once the student profile is determined all the courses will be consistently offered by the e-learning systems using the same shared profile.