iLearn: .NET-based Open Source Education Platform

Dates

November 2002 — October 2003

Principal Investigator

Alfred Essa (Sloan School of Business)

Goal

iLearn is a scaleable, open-source e-learning platform with rich functionality for course management, online communities, learning management, and content management.

Overview

The web services paradigm provides a new model for building and deploying software components. iLearn demonstrates how web service modules can be consumed and integrated within an enterprise application. Through its portal framework, iLearn serves as a deployment platform and gateway for accessing a variety of web service modules created in iCampus projects (e.g. iLabs, iMoat) and elsewhere.

The basic feature set for course management and online communities is well understood and will be derived from SloanSpace, the MIT Sloan School's proprietary course management system. iLearn goes beyond SloanSpace, however, in several ways:   It provides new functionality to support learning management and content management; it is also scaled for enterprise adoption and designed for compliance with MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) and MIT's infrastructure standards; and it will be implemented using a flexible and modular architecture based on the new paradigm of web services as realized in .NET.

In addition to delivering an enterprise-ready course management system and collaboration portal using the .NET architecture, iLearn serves as a componentized, web services-based "reference implementation" of the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) standards and APIs. The effort is an outgrowth of several years' work at MIT in developing SloanSpace and the generalization of that system into the current .LRN toolkit.

A significant weakness of the current iLearn architecture is its inability to delegate functions that properly belong at the enterprise layer. iLearn will seek to implement the OKI standards for enterprise delegation of key services such as authentication. iLearn will also leverage Microsoft .NET to build web services abstractions around key features, allowing for module delegation and transparent access to remote services and datasources. The iLearn application will be open source, allowing interested parties to learn from, modify and redistribute the source code at their discretion. At the same time, iLearn will be architected to support proprietary enhancements to the spine, and the creation of proprietary modules.

iLearn will go beyond SloanSpace by implementing a flexible service architecture that takes advantage of modularized educational computing applications and reusable components. The goal is to provide a framework infrastructure whereby software components can be shared within the university and across institutions.

Links

iLearn: .NET-based Open Source Education Platform