Integrating Industrial Partners into E- Teaching Efforts - a Portal to Support the Initiation of Co-operations

Learning Management Systems (LMS) form a powerful basis to integrate practitioners and industrial partners into teaching activities. Taking a university-wide LMS as the basis, one critical issue in this respect is to bring together lecturers and industrial partners willing to co-operate in teaching efforts addressing a mutual field of interest. In the present paper we introduce an approach to support the initiation phase of such co-operations between academic and industrial partners based on a web portal filled with content from the existing IT systems maintaining module descriptions, administrative data, and teaching content. We describe the requirements and basic as well as advanced use cases the portal should fulfill and explain the difficulties in integrating the portal into the heterogeneous system landscape at a university using the example of the University of Bamberg. We especially illustrate the different interfaces to be used to harvest information from the connected systems and to automate processes within a connected LMS to set up cooperations to be mediated by the LMS after being established. We also briefly describe the system architecture of the portal and how we tried to make it flexible and maintainable for the usage in different environments.