A distributed Service Oriented E-Learning

Environment based on Grid Technology

Hajar Kashfi Mohammda Reza Razzazi
[email protected] [email protected]
CEIT Department CEIT Department
Islamic Azad University of Qazvin Amirkabir University of technology
Qazvin,Iran Tehran,Iran
Key Words: Grid, Resource Sharing, E-learning, Web service, service oriented architecture.
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a growing interest to reduce costs of establishing learning environment systems. Few
administrators have the resources necessary to address e-learning complex issues in a way that enable wide-spread standardize
use of the technology across the institutions. E-learning systems consist of complex activities. Most of them are being designed
based on client/server, peer to peer; and recently Web Services architectures. These systems have major drawbacks because of
their limitations in scalability, availability, distribution of computing power and storage system, as well as sharing information
between users that contribute in these systems. This paper will outline the efforts that have be done to address these issues by
proposing the use of grid technology as scalable, flexible, coordinated and secure resource sharing among geographically
distributed individuals and institutions, in the context of e-learning. Meanwhile, by implementing our middleware based on web
service technology, we are able to reuse functionalities. This way, many service providers and content providers can contribute in
developing a very large scale integrated e-learning system.

Introduction
The emergence of the internet had great impact on e-learning due to the fact that it is an
effective and economical medium for making information available to dispread individuals.
Especially, it has radically changed the way in which people learn, teach and train (Resmer,1998).
Today, learning content can be made available even in remote places and without the need to
travel to the site where content is delivered (Pankratius,2003). E-Learning systems have been
topics of increasing interest in recent years. The number of users who are interested in e-learning
increases daily. These users have many different interests and objectives, and they will need to
access to a huge amount of information. Learners vary significantly in their prerequisites, their
abilities, their goals for approaching a learning system, their pace of learning, their way of
learning and time and money they are able to spend on learning. Therefore, a successful system
will be one that addresses all issues for all type of users across the world. Such a system should
be scalable, available, interoperable, extensible, and adaptable, and indeed, it should be based on
novel technologies. Since such systems are very huge, many organizations and institutes should
contribute to the construction of these systems (Sun,2002). This way, development costs of these
systems will highly decrease. Few administrators have the resources necessary to address e-
learning complex issues in a way that enable wide-spread standardize use of the technology
across the institutions.
One of the main objectives of e-learning systems is to make information accessible to any
type of users (Resmer,1998). E-learning systems consist of complex activities. Current efforts for
the next generation e-learning architectures are aiming for a transition from e-learning as an
integrated, centrally controlled system to a dynamic configurable federation of educational
services and information collections (Pankratius,2003) . Treating all systems in the e-learning
platform as services that deliver some utility to other services is the fundamental principal behind
the service level abstraction (Sun,2002). Therefore, developers adapt their systems to novel
technology trends and developments including technologies like Web services (Booth,2003) and
the Grid (Foster,1998a) as well as new paradigms like Peer-to-Peer networking and Service
oriented architectures. So, currently, most of e-learning systems are being designed based on
client/server, peer to peer; and recently Web Services architectures. These systems have major
drawbacks because of their limitations in scalability, availability, distribution of computing power
and storage system, as well as sharing services and information between users and organizations
contributing in these systems (Pankratius,2003) .
This paper reports the efforts that have been done to develop an E-learning grid middleware.
By proposing the use of grid technology as scalable, flexible, coordinated and secure resource
sharing among geographically distributed individuals and institutions (Foster,2001) in the context
of e-learning, we are able to address these concerns. Our middleware focused on Grid as well as
using agent (Luck,2002) and web service (Newcomer,2002) technologies to provide developers
an integrated infrastructure facilitating E-learning system development. Meanwhile, by
implementing our middleware based on web service technology, we are able to reuse
functionalities. This way, many e-learning service providers and content providers can contribute
in developing a very large scale integrated e-learning system.
The reminder of this paper is structured as in the following: section 2 gives some background
information in Grid technology, section 3 describes web services. In section 3, there is some
information in the field of software agents. In section 5 next generation e-learning systems is
exposed. Section 7 discusses our proposed middleware architecture, and finally, section 8
contains the conclusion.

Next Generation E-Learning Systems

In the area of e-learning (Vossen,2003), recent efforts concentrate on the reuse of application
functionalities. However most of these efforts in e-learning such as (IMS,2005) have been
focused on the reuse of learning material, a few of these researches have tried to introduce web
service as a preferable technology in this area (Pankratius,2003) . Some E-learning systems use
advantages of new features offered by Web services such as integration of heterogeneous
applications, publicity of available services, etc. As the adoption of this new technology
increases, it will become necessary to offer intermediary platforms that make it easier to find and
locate services and composing new services from the existing ones (Rodriguez,2003).
The success of e-learning has promoted the proliferation of different kinds of e-learning-
related software applications (Rodriguez,2003). Next generation e-learning systems will use Web
services that can match learning content to user context in a way that provides a customized,
personalized experience. Information retrieval (IR) functions that serve a critical role in many e-
leaning systems can be distributed or their functions be made available through the web services
framework (FU,2004). Also, by using web services, developers can provide the flexibility a
learner needs in tertiary education in which many institutions offer courses for education
(Vossen,2003).
Till now, E-learning and grid technology were two distinct areas. However, E-learning
increasingly addresses learning resources sharing, interoperability and various modes of
interactions ,and it is the convergence point of grid technology and distance learning
(Reklaitis,2001). In contrast with current e-learning applications which may use high
performance computing as a secondary task, modern e-learning systems can use novel
technologies such as grid and parallel computing as well as web services to reach interactive,
collaborative and reality based learning environments (Reklaitis,2001).
By proposing the use of grid technology, many service providers and content providers can
participate in various VOs. Using the concept of virtual organization in Grid, we can effectively
group users and organizations especially for cooperative learning. Organizations and institutes
that contribute in developing such a system can share their resources and services forming
different VOs. These organizations can cooperate under some policies to reach their common
objectives. Here, we need a middleware for uniform access to all theses resources that belong to
different administrative areas. Additionally, an infrastructure is needed that insure availability,
scalability, security, extensibility and interoperability for implementing such distributed systems.
Each organization should be able to reuse functionalities and services as well other resources that
are provided by other organizations.

Grid Technology
Grid is coordinate resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic multi-institutional virtual
organizations (Foster,1998b). An important issue that should be mentioned is that: “the sharing
that we are concerned with is not primarily file exchange but rather direct access to computers,
software data, and other resources” (Foster,2001). As it has been mentioned in (Foster,1998a),
this sharing is necessarily highly controlled and under some sharing rules. A set of individuals
and/or institutions defined by such sharing rules form Virtual Organizations (VOs). An actual
organization can participate in one or more VOs by sharing some or all of its resources. This
resource sharing is conditional: each resource owner makes resources available, subject to
constraints on when, where and what can be done (Foster,2001).
The background concept in grid is not new. As a real of fact, the collaboration and sharing of
resources in a geographically distributed environment is an idea existed since the computer
domain originated. In grid, people will be able to easily access to unlimited resources connected
through the Internet. Mechanisms for creating, managing, and exchanging information among
entities called grid services. The next generation of scientific experiments and studies, popularly
called as e-Science (Jennings,2001), will be carried out by communities of researchers from
different organizations that span national and international boundaries. Grid computing
(Foster,1998b) enables aggregation and sharing of resources through by bringing together
communities with common objectives and creating virtual organizations (Foster,2001). Data
Grids have evolved to tackle the twin challenges of large datasets and multiple data repositories
at distributed locations in data-intensive computing environments (Chervenak,2000).
Current e-learning systems are very limit; for example, it is vastly impossible to compute,
photo-realistic visualizations in real-time and display the computation result on a remote screen
(Pankratius,2003) with the advanced functionality of an e-learning grid, students could be
provided with the possibility to search, visualize and accomplish other high computational e-
learning services in an effective way.

Web Services
Internet is now almost service oriented and based on messaging and standards for XML
interfaces to enable coordinate use of distributed resources. This leads to high level of
interoperability in such heterogonous distributed environment. As a result, the basic concept and
 building block for internet computing becomes the Web service. A service in this context is a
network-enabled entity that provides some capabilities.(Reklaitis,2001)
Service-based architectures take legacy application functionality and expose it to the internet in a
reliable, highly available, scalable, flexible, manageable, and secure manner, easy and reliable
internet-based method to create and access learning.
Web Service technology has emerged as a new paradigm of distributed computing. They are
layered on the top of standard transfer protocols for transmitting messages that currently, the most
common ones are the XML-based specification SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), UDDI
(Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), and WSDL (Web Service Description
Language) (Booth,2003). This concept is illustrated in figure-1. A web service is a stand alone
software component that has a unique URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).
Figure 1.
Web service

Web services present another alternative distributed computing infrastructure which is

strongly promoted as a preferable one in contrast with the use of distributed object middlewares
such as Java RMI or CORBA (Booth,2003).

Web services to Grid services

A Grid can be defined as a layer of networked services that allow users single sign-on access
to a distributed collection of computing, data and application resources. Grid services allow the
entire collection to be seen as a seamless information processing system that the user can access
from any location (Chervenak,2000). A Grid Service is a Web Service which conforms to a set of
conventions (interfaces and behaviors) that define how a client interacts with a Grid Service.
Therefore, Grid Services are standard Web Services with improved characteristics.
Two advantages of web services framework that are mentioned in (Foster,1998b) as important
reasons for using web services in Grid are: First, the need to support the dynamic discovery and
composition of services in heterogeneous environments. Second, the widespread adoption of web
services mechanisms means that a framework based on web services can exploit numerous tools
and extant services.

Virtual educational organizations in E-learning Grid

A general agreement exists regarding roles played by people in a learning environment and
also the core functionality of modern e-learning platforms. These roles are as follows: Learner,
trainer, administrator, and the author. Authors (who may be teachers or instructional designers)
create content, which is stored under the control of a learning management system (LMS) and
typically in a database. Existing content can be updated, and it can also be exchanged with other
systems (Pankratius,2003) .
 As we have mentioned in third section, the concept of VO has introduced in grid technology.
An actual organization can participate in one or more VOs by sharing some or all of its resources
(Foster,2001). Since there are mainly three groups of users in an e-learning environment:
learners, tutors, and teachers, there should be various VOs in our grid to cover all types of these
users’ needs. There should be some organizations that join students with same learning interests.
Another VO is one that connects teachers working on same research areas. The third VO should
provide authors cooperation in providing learning contents, and so on. As we have mentioned
before,in these VOs, resource sharing is conditional; that is, each resources owner makes
resources available subject to constraints on when where and what can be done. For instance one
university may let professors of two other universities use its learning services, or even, one
author may allow some other authors to reuse one’s learning objects just in special period of time,
and maybe on some financial restrictions.

Reuse Learning services and learning content through Grid

Content consumed by learners and created by authors is commonly handled, stored, and
exchanged in the form of learning objects (LOs). Basically, LOs are units of study, exercise, or
practice that can be consumed in a single session, and they represent reusable granules that can be
authored independently of the delivery medium and can be accessed dynamically. Learning
objects can be stored in a database and are typically broken down into a collection of attributes.
In a similar way, other information relevant to a learning system (e.g, learner personal data,
learner profiles, general user data, etc.) can be mapped to common database structures
(Pankratius,2003) .
Reusable learning objects (RLOs) are building blocks of a personalized learning experience.
RLOs are individual objects, each with their own identity, type, size, and complexity, that can be
entered into a database or knowledge repository utilizing metadata description. Recently, many
efforts have been done to convert RLOs to Grid Learning objects. A Grid learning object extends
the functionality of a traditional learning object by adding grid functionality consisting of a
specific grid application layer (Pankratius,2003) . Therefore, we see that there is daily increasing
convergence between grid and e-learning technologies. An effort to accomplish this issue is in
progress by our research group.

Proposed E-Learning Grid Middleware

Our middleware is a grid middleware that has some specialized services for e-learning
systems. As it has been shown in figure.1, there are four main layers in this middleware. Like
middleware that has been exposed in (Foster,2001), the most bottom layer (grid core services
layer) itself is consist of four major grid middleware layers including: fabric, connectivity,
resource and collective layers. We have implemented our middleware using agent technology,
while we tried to represent each agent as a web service (Avila-Rosas,2003) to benefit from these
two major technologies both at the same time. Therefore, our middleware is a multi agent system
which represents grid core services for resource sharing and other basic services for e-learning
(Suzuki ,2002a), (Suzuki ,2002b). Each agent in this middleware is created, deployed and
published as a web service. This way, any institution or individual will be able not only to share
her content with other grid users, but also to be able to publish her various services across the
entire e-learning grid.
 The first step in developing such architecture is to provide a grid infrastructure. Users
incrementally, add their hosts to the grid. On the other hand, system administrators can add new
mediator servers to the system anytime needed to extend the system in desired scale. In this
architecture, the entire grid is divided into multiple administrative areas. In each area, a group of
agents are responsible to serve some clients that are under control of that area. For each area,
there is one mediator server, that response to all requests of clients in that area. There are multiple
agents hosting on each mediator server. The most important agent is a mediator agent that is
responsible for coordination of other agents. This agent connects fabric agents, which are under
its control, to the entire grid. Also, this agent is responsible for creating other manager agents that
should exist on each mediator server to provide e-learning and Grid core services.
Figure 2.
E-Learning
Grid middleware
Layers

E-Learning basic services layer is the heart of this E-Learning grid middleware. In this layer,
agents represent basic services for e-learning using other agents that exist in grid core services
layer. Using these agents, users are able to access and share all types of information including
papers, magazines, e-books, etc. with other users. As a real of fact, except sharing other resources
(hardware resources such as CPU Power and storage media), any user can contribute in
publishing learning content in this system. On the other hand, any organization can publish its
learning content to its members as well as other organizations. In this layer, basic functionalities
of e-learning system are provided. There are multiple agents that cooperate with each other to
perform desired services. In figure.2 layers of this architecture has been shown.
By using our middleware, different organization and institutes will be able to cooperate with
each other to create a large scale distributed learning environment. Using core services that are
provided in this middleware, any type of users can join to the grid, and use its services.
Organizations aiming to create a complete library and educational environment can use this
middleware to structure their resources and to cooperate with other organizations that exist in the
Grid. They will be able to create their own additional services and publish them to others as web
services.

Conclusion
Our middleware builds on the assumption that typical e-learning systems are collections of
activities or processes that interact with users and suitably chosen content. This enables us to
subdivide the main functionality of these systems into a number of stand-alone applications,
which can then be realized individually or in groups as Web services. Web services, on the other
hand, are offered by a number of providers. These providers can cooperate under some policies in
the form of some VOs to reach their common objectives. In this architecture, individuals
(containing all e-learning roles) and organizations can cooperate to establish a distributed
learning environment. We proposed a middleware for uniform access to all theses resources that
belong to different administration areas. We described how new technologies including agent,
web service and Grid and emerging standards can be applied to E-learning. Leveraging these
technologies in e-learning environment can yield significant benefits. In this paper we proposed
an integrated agent based middleware architecture for e-learning on the Grid. Convergence of
three major technologies to proposing a middleware for creating large scale e-learning systems
including agent, web services and the grid help us to address all issues that have not been
addressed by current architectures yet. Using a multi agent system in which all agents have a high
degree of autonomy different grid and E-learning services have been effectively deployed in our
middleware architecture.

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