Delivery
eLMS is an adaptive learning platform that supports interoperation using web services, both in conjunction with enacting courseware designs and in managing domain-specific objects, such as classes, users, and courseware. The heart of the eLMS platform is a model-based delivery engine that enacts learning designs authored with the CAPE design environment.
The platform automatically captures detailed instrumentation of these design enactments, and additional instrumentation—to support grading using custom rubrics, for example—can be incorporated into courseware designs with CAPE. The resulting delivery records can be queried by instructors and authors using an integrated data mining facility These capabilities enable an intimate understanding of what learners actually do with on-line learning experiences, which is essential to making incremental improvements over time.
Profiles can be used to collect information about learners, classes, and courseware resulting from design enactments. Courseware profiles can be used to collect statistics about the use of a particular learning design, whether this use occurs between semesters at a single institution or across multiple institutions. Learner profiles can collect information elicited from a learner during an earlier courseware for use as part of an adaptation scheme in a subsequent courseware. Class profiles can create digests of information from assignments performed outside class for use in scaffolding classroom-based learning experiences.
Shared state is a sufficient condition for enabling many kinds of interactions between learners, and between learners and an instructor or teaching assistants. The Courseware and Class profiles provide such shared state, and CAPE-authored designs can leverage these capabilities to create many kinds of collaborative services embedded within eLMS courseware. An example is support for asynchronous dialoging between an instructor and the students in a class. We provide a demonstration of using the Class profile to support such interactions.
Another example of using the shared state provided by profiles is the implementation of experimental research designs to evaluate courseware design alternatives, for example. One possible research design involves randomly dividing the students in a class into groups and providing each group a different "treatment", one of which typically serves as a control. We provide a demonstration of using the Class profile to support such research designs.
eLMS allows learners to review materials and activities across multiple sessions, to take private notes that can be exported from the learning environment, and to access context-sensitive help resources provided by learning designs. eLMS instructors and teaching assistants can manage the rosters of classes and make courseware assignments to a class or to individuals in the class. The status of learners completing assignments can be monitored, learners can be selectively released from synchronization points defined by learning designs, and instructors can replay assignments with learners during face-to-face meetings. Courseware revisions uploaded by authors are differentially versioned to avoid disruption of in-progress enactments with learners.
While eLMS can be employed directly to manage the use of CAPE-authored designs by classes of learners, it can also be transparently embedded into other learning platforms. We have developed a building block integration of eLMS with the Blackboard Learning System, as an example of a custom integration. With this plug-in, instructors can assign eLMS courseware to their learners just as any other kind of Blackboard assignment. Documentation for this embedding solution is available online.
As a somewhat weaker—but more broadly applicable—form of embedding, we support packaging eLMS courseware using the SCORM standard, thereby enabling delivery from a standards-compliant learning platform. This approach to integration is similar to the SCORM platform delivering material from an external content repository. With this solution, eLMS courseware can be transparently delivered from a variety of commercial learning platforms, such as WebCT, as well as non-commercial platforms, such as Moodle and Sakai.
When there is no local learning platform, we provide one additional option for delivering eLMS courseware called Quota Links These are essentially limited-use URLs that include a weak form of authentication with courseware launching. Users accessing such links are asked to identify themselves and choose a passcode that can be used to re-access the courseware at a later time, allowing courseware delivery over multiple browser sessions. Delivery records from such accesses can be retrieved by the eLMS user who creates the Quota Link. The effect is to enable a class to be dynamically formed as learners access a Quota Link for courseware delivery. As the name suggests, Quota Links allow only a limited number of deliveries of the associated courseware to be created.
These and other capabilities of the eLMS learning platform are summarized in the concept map below.
eLMS is built on open source technologies, including the Zope web application server and Apache All eLMS servers are currently deployed on the secure OpenBSD operating system and are securely accessed by web-services and browser clients using SSL connections.