Educational Enterprise Interoperability
Increasing collaboration among enterprises during the entire product life cycle is a global trend. Organizations are transforming themselves into "networked organizations". But to achieve this, enterprise systems and applications need to be interoperable in order to achieve seamless business interaction across organizational boundaries. The need for interoperability is twofold: intra-enterprise (e.g. full integration with the Management Information System) and inter-enterprise (e.g. interchange of transcripts or learning plans among institutions). For this to be possible organizations must be able to interoperate and integrate data as well as software.
Currently, enterprises face many difficulties related to lack of interoperability. Interoperability, defined as "the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged", needs to be addressed in respect of all layers of an enterprise (including ICT Systems, Knowledge, Business and Semantics). It needs to be tackled using a holistic perspective, a multidisciplinary approach, and by bring together the best research teams, industry expertise and ICT suppliers.
There are a variety of enterprise architectures that could be used, to one degree or another, to achieve the goal of interoperability and thus increase teaching and learning effects. Single monolithic system approaches are not sustainable. Schools should be able to choose best-of-breed systems from multiple vendors. This approach requires standards for interoperability and vendors that adhere to those standards.
Enterprise specifications state of art
There are a number of standards and specifications in the educational enterprise domain. The IMS Consortium produded the IMS Enterprise and IMS Enterprise Services specifications. The former defines the an information model for a standardrized set of data structures that can be used to exchange enrolment information between Learning Management Systems (LMS) and a number of classes of Enterprise Systems. The latter describes how systems should manage the exchange of information that describes people, groups and memberships within the context of learning.
Another related set of specifications, well tested in practice, are the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). SIF is a US Industry initiative to develop an open specification for ensuring that K-12 instructional and administrative software applications work together more effectively. The EU-funded project OASIS (Open Architecture and Schools in Information Society) produded an European version of the data models and business processes described in SIF. OASIS was supported by the CEN/ISSS WS-LT thourgh a Working Team who produced three CEN Workshop Agreements in the area of internationalisation and localization of these enterprise specifications.
There are many other relevant specifications in this area. A non comprehensive list could be: the OKI Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), the IMS Digital Repositories Specification, the IMS Resource List Interoperability, the Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA), etc.
Issues
Enterprise specifications are perhaps the most horizontal standardisation area within learning technologies as they deal with integration among different systems within the educational institution and among institutions. We need to take a comprehensive perspective where other systems than LMS or VLE are regarded as part of the overall learning environment.
There are demands for systems managing access, interchange of transcripts or learning plans, analysing skill gaps, doing talent management and development, managing intellectual property rights, etc. There is also a need for developing and maintaining a system for global identifiers to facilitate a comprehensive educational learning infrastructure throughout Europe.
To solve these issues one should agree upon a viable approach to building learning technologies, i.e. an European Learning Architecture. The enterprise experts consulted during the LIFE process have contributed with a number of interoperability scenarios that could serve as a base line for this work.
Recommendations
Experts should be gathered in order to identify the workflows and processes involved in the Education Enterprise. Integration requires not only exchange of data but also needs considering incompatibilities between workflows, semantics and the software. Any proposal for a monolithic system architecture within the enterprise domain should be discouraged. We should adopt a distributed model made up of distinct, stand-alone components that communicate over open protocols and interfaces. This would allow for a plug-and-play paradigm in the development of software that can be glued with the already existing Education Enterprise environment. There is a need to develop an appropriate system for global identifiers, and the European Union should fund a project leading to a viable system. There is also a need to fund research on how to deal with digital rights within an educational context.
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