JISC

This project has now completed. See the project website and the final report available at the foot of this page.

A key issue for institutions in deploying e-learning systems is to integrate them with existing institutional data. An obvious example is information about all students taking a course and all staff teaching a course, that will be held in the institution’s student and staff records system. This dataset is described by the IMS Enterprise schema, which defines an XML schema for person, group and membership data. An earlier JISC project carried out by a team from CETIS has already built a web services toolkit around this standard (the CETIS-ES SDK). But in order to be able to use this at Sussex University, we need to extend it so that it can connect to an Oracle database, and is integrated with Moodle.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to support the further development and refining of the CETIS IMS Enterprise toolkit.

The specific objectives are to:

• Evaluate the ease of installation and use of the toolkit, and work with the toolkit developers around additional documentation, installation notes etc
• Develop the toolkit further so that it can be used with an Oracle database, or any other database that uses JDBC
• Develop an Oracle database API or set of views, to make deploying the toolkit simpler for other institutions
• Work within the Moodle developer community around integrating IMS Enterprise schema data into Moodle
• Provide information to the Further and Higher Education communities and beyond on using the toolkit

Project Methodology

The project will closely collaborate with the original authors of the CETIS-ES SDK to enable maximum efficiency in the design and development work being undertaken.

The main mode of communication on the project for collaboration, bug reporting etc will be via the appropriate open forums on Sourceforge and Moodle. Project documents will be held on a website so that access is open. The JISC Open Source Maturity Model will be used.

Technologies used will be J2EE, SOAP, WSDL, XML, SQL and PHP.

Newly developed features will be released under open source licenses, and documentation and other deliverables will be made available on appropriate websites.

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

The key deliverables are:

• Oracle extensions to the CETIS-ES toolkit
• Enhanced documentation, scripts etc so that the toolkit is more portable and hence more institutions are able to use it “out of the box”
• An Oracle API/set of views for connectivity to IMS Enterprise model
• IMS Enterprise connectivity enhanced for Moodle
• Contribution to forums, meetings, etc to raise awareness of the e-learning framework, IMS Enterprise and the toolkits