JISC

Start date: 10 May 2004

End date: 29 October 2004

Funding programme: e-Learning Frameworks and Tools programme

Project website: http://www.brock.ac.uk/sweet

JISC theme(s): e-Learning

Brockenhurst College

The project is designed to address some common scenarios which appear time and time again during institutional MLE development. Some of them are:

• Assigning students and staff appropriate access rights to VLE content and services;
• Smaller applications which need to be aware of up-to-date class lists, locations of people and groups, enrolments and related data, without duplicating existing data;
• Providing staff & student access to timetables from a range of applications (institutional portals, mobile phones, messaging systems, Personal Information Managers, college calendars).

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to address these common scenarios by publishing a toolkit to enable the adoption of a service oriented approach.
The specific objectives are to:

• provide an easy to install, easy to use, highly adaptable implementation of Enterprise Web Services (EWS) for the Microsoft platform;
• extend EWS (using the extensibility provisions in the spec) to allow the transport of timetable data;
• evaluate the iCalendar / xCal specifications as possible formats for timetable exchange.
• demonstrate and evaluate interoperability between .net and Java web service technology;
• present MLE developers with an easy way to move away from duplication of data and functionality, and towards service orientation;
• evaluate a “test driven” approach to software development.

Project Methodology

The development and testing of an interoperable technical toolkit for MLE developers working with the Microsoft .net framework.

Deliverables

The complete toolkit will be made available through open source licensing for developers to use as the basis for their own MLE back-end projects.