Toward an Open and Interoperable e-Learning Portal: OEPortal

With the rapid advance of stand-alone e-learning systems, we believe a sharable and interoperable portal platform capable of integrating various existing learning systems is critical for the future development of elearning systems. We highlight two problems as the root causes for current ineffective sharing of learning resources: learning object interoperability and learning activity interoperability. In this paper, we propose an open and interoperable e-learning portal architecture to solve these problems: 1) With regard to learning object interoperability, we propose WSRP+ service as an enhancement to WSRP standard to send presentation content and intercept crucial information from LMSs in order to facilitate the presentation-level integration of learning objects and keep the learner’s learning status in our e-learning portal. 2) With regard to learning activity interoperability, BPEL4WS is used for the task-based orchestration of course workflows among shared learning systems, in which value-added tasks such as grading, evaluation, recording, etc., can also be integrated as a whole. At the end of this paper, we present our prototype implementation to illustrate the feasibility of our approach.