iCampus Framework

Dates

April 2001 — December 2003

Principal Investigators

Professor Hal Abelson (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
Paul Oka (Microsoft Research)
Dave Mitchell (Microsoft Research)

Goal

Demonstrate the benefits of web services architectures for the university educational computing infrastructure — including the ability to modularize implementations of educational computing applications, create reusable components, and enable component and resource-sharing within the university and across institutions.

Overview

The iCampus Framework project has implemented a collection of web services that illustrate the benefits of service architectures for university educational computing infrastructure. These services have been implemented using Microsoft's .NET architecture, and they interoperate with other web service architectures that adhere to World Wide Web Consortium's service standards based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Service Definition Language).

Our initial focus was on creating web service modules to support two other iCampus projects:   iLab and iMoat. For iLab, we built "lab controllers" that provide the basic authorization, resource allocation, event notification, and collaboration services required to deploy on-line laboratories in a way that can be scaled across multiple laboratories at multiple institutions. For the iMoat project, we built the basic authorization and workflow services to support that project's vision of a worldwide service where universities collaborate in online evaluation.

"When it comes to educational computing, most universities are technology islands, each with its own infrastructure for its own students and faculty. Web service frameworks could radically change the landscape for higher education by making it practical to create national and global shared resources for learning. Some examples we're working on in the iCampus framework are shared laboratory equipment, shared libraries, and shared course materials, but the range of national and global collaboration on learning web services could be limitless." — Prof. Hal Abelson