Boosting the Adoption of Computer Managed Instruction Functionalities in E-learning Systems

Standardization efforts in e-learning are mainly aimed at achieving interoperability among Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Learning Object (LO) authoring tools. In particular, the main standard producers are giving special attention to a set of functionalities, referred to as Computer Managed Instruction (CMI) and also known as SCORM Run-Time Environment. Their adoption is crucial in the achievement of full interoperability among LMSs and LO authoring tools since they allow LOs to be launched in the LMS and to exchange data with it. Even desirable, standard compliancy and guideline adoption are difficult to obtain for LMS producers. This paper presents two design solutions aimed at boosting the adoption of CMI functionalities in Object-Oriented and Message-Oriented LMS systems, respectively. The former is a framework, named CMIFramework, which allows LMS developers to rapidly adopt CMI functionalities in Object-Oriented systems. The latter is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)based reference model for offering the CMI functionalities as a service, external to the LMS. We investigate several case studies concerning the adoption of CMI functionalities, using our solutions, in different e-learning contexts.