What are the challenges of establishing an integrated eLearning infrastructure? What problems usually appear?

Kristijan Zimmer: Adding an increasing number of mission-critical applications, systems, and databases in a disorganised way can present a great problem to everyone involved in teaching and learning at a higher-education institution and slow down wider institutional adoption of eLearning.

Teachers and students always need to remember new web URLs, usernames, and passwords. Students miss important deadlines marked as calendar entries in one of the systems, not being able to keep up with information and course activities appearing in different course shells of different LMSs, portals, and intranets scattered all over the eLearning and information archipelago. This can result in users being deeply unsatisfied with technical infrastructure.

Connecting those isolated application islands is a first step toward making all those systems and applications more useful and bringing new life and meaning to all of them. In some cases, systems will share and synchronise data. In others, they will "trust" each other enough to let users go from one to another without the need to re-authenticate or visualise data retrieved from other systems.

Finding the optimal integration solution is often not easy and depends on many parameters. These especially include the "openness" of systems in regard to integration with other systems, their compliance to relevant international standards, and sometimes too-strict institutional policies about the protection of personal information.

Could you please describe your experience putting a large-scale eLearning service such as an E-Campus in place?

Kristijan Zimmer: Finding the way to connect a new system or database to an existing system can sometimes be more difficult than initially anticipated. Usually, the first step is determining the possibilities: What benefits can be achieved from the integration? The result of a brainstorming among the experts of the particular system, eLearning experts, institutional policy makers, and software developers is the full list of potential benefits.

The next step is the analysis of the new system that is supposed to be integrated into the E-Campus. How -œopen- is the system? With which standards does it comply? Is it an open-source system? Is source code available under some other license? Is there an integration layer (SOAP, XML-RPC, ATOM, RSS…) or an API (Application programming interface) available? Is the system "aware" of any modern authentication protocol, such as LDAP, Radius or Active Directory?

If the application is an outdated, legacy "black box" - is someone providing support? Can original developers be consulted and, if so, under which conditions? Is the database of the system "readable"? Does the database have an API, and can SQL queries be executed?

After the system that is a potential candidate for the E-Campus element has been analysed, data comes into focus. Is the data available from the new system useful to the rest of the E-Campus? Will it affect existing data integrity in any way? What is the policy regarding the privacy of the data? Is the user and course data that is already stored in the E-Campus useful to the new system in an optimal and synergic way?

After the analysis, the list of possibilities usually becomes shorter, and again, the realistic benefits are communicated among project stakeholders. A brief feasibility and cost/benefit analysis is also done, and if the conditions for the project are favourable, the programming design phase can begin.

What are the benefits and synergies of using E-Campus?

Kristijan Zimmer: Our current version of the integrated E-Campus consists of several systems, which we sometimes call the "E-bricks". In the centre of all integrations into other systems, there is the content-management system (CMS), responsible for the intranet, public web, and the e-portfolio. The set of three currently connected learning management systems includes Moodle, WebCT, and a Croatian LMS called AhyCo, with more to come.

The currently supported E-library system is an open-source solution from the UK called E-Prints, with DSpace as another candidate. Finance-related functionalities are currently the responsibility of SAP and customer-relationship management is the task of an open- source solution called SugarCRM. The learning-object repository is now being planned, with several systems being investigated, including Ariadne, but also an Estonian system called "Waramu" and a proprietary system from Giunti Labs / Harvest Road Hive.

The idea is that, if wisely integrated, all functionalities of all listed systems become easily and in "1-click-2-eLearning" fashion available to users, with data available to other systems.

The next example shows the benefits of connecting the content-management system- the central portal - with a learning-management system. Since all the students have already been added as users in the CMS directly from the student-information system (SIS), the E-Campus can automatically enroll them in the appropriate courses, when the teacher allows them to do so. This way, teachers don't have to worry if the students have access or not during the initial set-up and testing of the course, since students don't even need to have accounts created in the LMS during that period.

When the teacher selects the button "allow students access", all the student accounts are automatically created, and all of them are enrolled in the course. Since the list is taken directly from the SIS, there is no need to copy-paste the list of users, import them from a spreadsheet, or provide access passwords. Teachers can also select which students should have access from the given list if that is appropriate for that course.

Teachers use the same management interface for all the courses and can also manage several courses at the same time. This allows teachers to send announcements for all of their courses in different LMSs at the same time.

Students can see all internal e-mails and announcements for all the courses in different LMSs on the same CMS page as integrated information and can also see their personal calendar that includes all the date-and-time-specific information merged into a single calendar view. Students can also send and reply to their e-mails directly from the CMS without even entering an LMS, regardless of what LMS they are using.

Administrators no longer have the task of enrolling students and opening courses. All of this is done automatically, and there is no need to do it manually or using copy-paste or more complex import methods. Since the students are enrolled on demand when the teacher actually wants them to access online course, the number of required licenses (in vendor systems) of the institution in a given period of time is generally lower than if all students had access to all their online courses from the beginning to the end of semester.

What future impact on education do you expect from the use of open systems and IT standards in higher education?

Kristijan Zimmer: I believe the future is bright or at least brighter than a few years ago! Nowadays, almost all new systems and most of the new versions of the existing systems are developed with integration in mind.

The growth of use of high-quality open-source systems for various purposes with feature-rich API's enables users to intervene in the programming code and change it according to their needs, which fosters the exchange of knowledge among developers.

There is also increasing awareness of the importance of institution-wide, nation-wide, and global authorisation, as well as authentication infrastructure and well-structured databases with many supported APIs that enable direct access to the data.

All this makes ownership of each of the open systems and the entire integrated infrastructure less risky for the institution that implements it. It also makes users of open systems less dependant on the closed vendor system, whose business policies and development timelines might not always be favourable for them.