OEPortal: An open, unified, and interoperable presentation-preserving e-learning portal

With the rapid advance of stand-alone e-Iearning systems, we believe a sharable and interoperable portal platform capable of integrating various existing learning systems is critical for the next step development of e-learning systems. We highlight four difficulties in today's e-learning systems as the root causes for current ineffective sharing of stand-alone learning systems: interoperability of e-learning systems, collaboration of learning objects, presentation level integration of learning objects, and transparent access of e-learning systems. In this paper, we propose an open, unified, and interoperable e-learning portal to meet this critical need. In our proposed system, we employs WSRP [23] services to preserve the presentation of shared learning objects from participating learning systems, and BPEL4WS [1] for the task-based course work/low orchestration among shared learning systems. We also explain key steps in course preparation and execution to provide clear pictures of how our system enables actual interoperability of numerous existing learning objects / components / systems.