JISC

In response to the ever increasing complexity of integrated learning and teaching systems, there is an equally increasing demand for institutions to be able to manage person and group identity, sharing this information between appropriate systems components, or bricks, in an open and sustainable fashion in order to improve the student experience. BEWT intends to benefit from the work of the contributors of the CETIS IMS Enterprise Webservices Toolkit (CETIS ES SDK) by integrating same into the UHI institutional VLE, Bodington, which is an important VLE used by many UK HE and FE institutions for teaching and learning. UHI also manages student and staff information through its institutional SRS, SITS:Vision, which interacts with other UHI elearning service bricks through a middleware brick called Siva which allows SRS information to drive account management in the related bricks, including the Bodington VLE. In addition to utilizing the CETIS ES SDK while extending Bodington and Siva, two core bricks in the UHI elearning service wall, BEWT will help to standardize Bodington to conform to using IME ES; this in turn would be valuable to other systems integrators seeking to tie Bodington into other IMS ES aware bricks. Also, BEWT will provide important evaluative feedback, generated through real use of the toolkit, back to the CETIS ES SDK developers. Finally, there should be an impact on the wider VLE community to the benefits of using IMS ES in elearning scenarios.

Aims and Objectives

BEWT will trial the integration and use of the CETIS ES SDK within the UHI elearning services framework to provide distributed user profile management between specific service components. The trial will focus on the integration of the ES SDK with the Bodington Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), not only to enhance existing functionality for the wider open source community but also to provide interoperability with other core e-learning services at UHI.

The specific objectives are to:

• Plan and model an integration of the CETIS ES SDK into the UHI infrastructure;
• Integrate and test the ES SDK into Bodington via Apache Axis;
• Extend the Bodington Authorisation system to use IMS ES data dynamically;
• Integrate and test the ES SDK into Siva via Apache Axis;
• Produce evaluative feedback, documentation of experiences and reports for the wider community.

Project Methodology

BEWT will use professional software methodologies to take the existing CETIS ES SDK and tie it into the existing Bodington VLE and Siva Identity Management systems. It will involve utilizing the IMS ES standard specification for managing the exchange of person, group and membership information between systems. SOAP, WSDL and WSDD will ensure compliance with the WS-I guidelines on WS interoperability. BEWT will use J2EE technology as its underpinning architectural language, with Apache Axis acting as a stable base upon which to implement WSs in JAVA using the Apache Tomcat application server.

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

BEWT will deliver an IMS ES extended, WS enabled VLE which is important to the UK HE and FE community, as well as extend Siva, middleware which is opensource and available to other UK HE / FE institutions to develop and deploy in their own institutions. During the integration of the CETIS ES SDK into these two applications, evaluation of the quality of the SDK and its use, including process, techniques and documentation, will be given both to the CETIS ES SDK developers, but also to the wider UK HE/FE community, along with important use cases and analysis concerning the use of IMS ES to manage identity information between integrated systems within and between learning institutions.