SEMANTICALLY INTEGRATED E-LEARNING INTEROPERABILITY AGENT

Educational collaboration through e-learning is one of the fields that have been
worked on since the emergence of e-learning in educational system. The e-learning
standards (e.g. learning object metadata standard) and e-learning system architectures
or frameworks, which support interoperation of correlated e-learning systems, are the
proposed technologies to support the collaboration. However, these technologies have
not been successful in creating boundless educational collaboration through e-learning.
In particular, these technologies offer solutions with their own requirements or
limitations and endeavor challenging efforts in applying the technologies into their elearning
system. Thus, the simpler the technology enhances possibility in forging the
collaboration.
This thesis explores a suite of techniques for creating an interoperability tool
model in e-learning domain that can be applied on diverse e-learning platforms. The
proposed model is called the e-learning Interoperability Agent or eiA. The scope of
eiA focuses on two aspects of e-learning: Learning Objects (LOs) and the users of elearning
itself. Learning objects that are accessible over the Web are valuable assets
for sharing knowledge in teaching, training, problem solving and decision support.
Meanwhile, there is still tacit knowledge that is not documented through LOs but
embedded in form of users' expertise and experiences. Therefore, the establishment of
educational collaboration can be formed by the users of e-learning with a common
interest in a specific problem domain.
The eiA is a loosely coupled model designed as an extension of various elearning
systems platforms. The eiA utilizes XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
technology, which has been accepted as the knowledge representation syntax, to
bridge the heterogeneous platforms. At the end, the use of eiA as facilitator to mediate
interconununication between e-leaming systems is to engage the creation of
semantically Federated e-learning Community (FeC). Eventually, maturity of the FeC
is driven by users' willingness to grow the community, by means of increasing the elearning
systems that use eiA and adding new functionalities into eiA.