Towards Teacher-Managed Deployment and Integration of Non-SaaS Tools in Virtual Learning Environments

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) such as Moodle or Sakai are now commonplace in many educational settings, but the limited set of built-in tools (e.g. chats or forums) is often mentioned as a drawback. While successful solutions to integrate Software as a Service (SaaS) tools are reported in the literature (e.g. IMS Basic LTI and GLUE), there are other non-SaaS tools with potential for education that cannot be integrated in VLEs. These include single-user standalone tools that are run on local computers without a web-based interface (e.g. Matlab), but also virtual machines and laboratories that are common in Computer Science-related disciplines. This paper addresses the integration of these non-SaaS tools in VLEs, proposing an architecture to help teachers to select and configure non-SaaS tools using existing integration approaches from VLEs, but that also relies on cloud infrastructures for provisioning and deploying these tools transparently to the end users.