Web Services for Teaching: A Case Study

The area of software applications for teaching (teaching applications for short), whether for distance teaching or for traditional presence teaching, is characterized by a multitude of different requirements and expectations. A corresponding multitude of different teaching applications have been and continue to be implemented, most of them sharing parts of their functionalities that tend to be re-implemented over and over again. The paper argues that a compositional approach based on web services would overcome this deficiency quite naturally. The paper classifies the services that need to be implemented by teaching applications and proposes an open architecture based on web services for information interchange, integration, and interoperability among existing teaching applications.