CD-LOMAS: A COLLABORATIVE DISTRIBUTED LEARNING

OBJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Andrea De Lucia, Rita Francese, Ignazio Passero and Genoveffa Tortora

Dipatimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Salerno,via Ponte don Melillo 1, Fisciano (SA), Italy

Keywords: e-Learning, Learning Management Systems, Learning Object, Configuration Management, Content

management, SCORM.

Abstract: Learning Objects are stored in repositories and spread through Internet. The educational sector needs to

share good quality educational contents, which can be reused and adopted in several contexts. In this paper

we present CD-LOMAS (Collaborative Distributed Learning Object MAnagement System) to support the

sharing of contents and the collaboration on their development in a highly distributed environment.

Complex Learning Objects are decomposed into simpler Learning Objects that can be distributed at

different sites. In CD-LOMAS artifact management features, such as coordination of cooperative workers

and versioning, are integrated with context-awareness.

1 INTRODUCTION

The growing of Internet has had as a result the rapid

development of the on-line distance learning. Many

faculties in the entire world are creating digital

contents which are stored in Content Management

Systems (CMSs) and spread through the servers of

the various educational organizations. These

contents are stored and handled in systems requiring

different access characteristics, usually with

different logins and differently structured. In this

way it is difficult to retrieve and exchange contents.

Today the main challenge in the e-learning research

sector concerns to let the digital contents more

accessible, usable and exploitable, as stated by the

European research program (eContentplus, 2005).

The actual trends is to create on-line contents which

are brief, last at most 20 minutes (ADL, 2006; IEEE

LTSC, 2006; IMS, 2006) and including (De Lucia et

Al., 2006):

• text, graphics and movies

• a navigational schema

• assessment and self assessment.

This modularization of the contents has lead to the

Learning Objects (LOs), elementary members on the

technological and educational plan enabling the

modular composition and the reuse of the base units

in the various contexts. The vision of the content

fragmented in LOs requires specific units of content

providers, the Learning Object Repositories (LOR).

The essential functionalities of a repository are:

storing, searching and maintaining LOs. In order to

enable the search and the re-use of the LOs various

international organizations have contributed to the

definition of a standard for the Learning Object

metadata (ADL, 2006, IEEE LTSC, 2006, IMS,

2006). The Advanced Distance Learning group

(ADL, 2006), sponsored by the Department of the

Defense of the United States, has supplied a great

contribution to this objective creating a set of

specifications called Shareable Content Object

Reference Model (SCORM) with the aim to

standardize the contents of e-learning which can be

created using various programming languages and

can be placed in different computers, scattered in

various parts of the world. SCORM enables to

classify the Learning Objects by using LOM

metadata – Learning Object Metadata. In this way, it

is possible to create repository of multimedia

contents that can be searched through sophisticated

indexing systems and exchanged between the

repositories.

An additional factor to consider is that LOs have

different granularity and can be aggregated until

composing entire courses. Consequently, they can be

the result of the cooperation of various individuals.

Thus, Configuration Management is also required to

handle LOs in a cooperative manner. Tools

De Lucia A., Francese R., Passero I. and Tortora G. (2007).

CD-LOMAS: A COLLABORATIVE DISTRIBUTED LEARNING OBJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 34-41

DOI: 10.5220/0002380600340041

 SciTePress

supporting Configuration Management for software

systems, such as (CVS, 2006, De Lucia et Al., 2004,

RCS, 2006, Perforce, 2006, Rational ClearCase,

2006) help to coordinate the activities of the

developers, supporting or avoiding the parallel

development through policies of locking or assisting

them in the conflict resolution through the merging.

The capability to add these functionalities to a

Learning Content Management System (LCMS)

enables organizations to cooperate in the repository

creation and in the sharing of LOs. If several

organizations need to cooperate in the creation of a

distributed repository, we have to manage the

versioning of LOs at different granularity levels and

support context awareness in such a way to know

who is using or changing a LO. These problems

grow together with the growing of the on-line

learning community which requires ever and ever

the management of the Learning Object Sharing. In

this way it is pursued the goal of avoiding the

duplication of the work by creating a unified content

strategy (Rockey, 2002).

In this paper we present CD-LOMAS

(Collaborative Distributed Learning Object

MAnagement System) an on-going research project

aiming at designing and developing a Web system

for the management of LOs distributed on several

sites. In particular, the aim is to enable the sharing of

contents represented using the standard SCORM and

the collaboration on their development, supporting

their reuse at different granularity level. The project

also aims at providing context awareness to content

authors that share the learning material, as in the

case when a course is articulated in two parts, such

as laboratory and theory, or implicitly in case of

teachers of parallel classes of the same university, of

different universities, or of course at different

didactic levels, such as in case of first and second

degree levels. Context awareness is granted by

notifying the interested people when an updating of

a LO occurs, without generating an overload of

messages. CD-LOMAS also supports the LO

revisions for granting that the produced material is

of the required quality.

The remainder of this paper is organized as

follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3

presents an overview of CD-LOMAS, while Section

4 describes the proposed architecture. Section 5

presents how CD-LOMAS supports cooperation and

collaboration, while Section 6 discusses concluding

remarks and future work.

2 RELATED WORK

Many Learning Object repositories are available on

the Web. In particular, the Multimedia Educational

Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

(MERLOT, 2006) repository is one of the first

(1997) and famous management system of LOs. It is

managed from the University of the State of

California and has links with thousand of LOs of

several types, such as interactive applications,

presentations, and examples. The use of MERLOT is

free and the inclusion of a Learning Object is

subordinated to a peer review phase before being

accepted. MERLOT stores only the metadata

associated to a Learning Object and not its contents.

Another important repository is the Campus Alberta

Repository of Educational Objects (CAREO) created

by three American universities: the University of

Alberta, the University of Calgary and the

University of Athabasca. Differently from

MERLOT, it also stores the contents of LOs. Both

MERLOT and CAREO do not enable to recombine

Learning Object at various levels of granularity. The

(eduSource, 2006) project, currently ongoing, aims

at creating a net of interoperable learning object

repositories. It involves several universities,

governmental institutions and industries. The

repositories communicate through the eduSource

Communication Layer (ECL) (Eap et Al., 2004).

The initial phase has concerned the definition of the

Web services and of the protocols necessary to

enable the various institutions to communicate.

Features for generating and managing LOs in

SCORM compliant format are provided by two open

source tools, such as (RELOAD, 2006) and its web

version, (WELOAD, 2006). Both systems handle a

centralized repository.

(Hossain et Al., 2004) proposed a three-tier

architecture which enables the 3D navigation of

distributed learning object repositories. No

collaboration among multiple users is provided.

Single users can author LOs aggregating them in

SMIL format. LOs do not follow a specific standard.

(De Moura et Al., 2005) use Web Services for

integrating heterogeneous Learning Object

repositories. The proposed approach is based on

mediators and wrappers. Data sources are

autonomous and heterogeneous (RDBMS, OODB,

XMLDB, files, etc.). Ontologies are used to

represent the mapping rules between a global

common schema and the local schemas.

CD-LOMAS: A COLLABORATIVE DISTRIBUTED LEARNING OBJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

3 CD-LOMAS OVERVIEW

CD-LOMAS is a distributed environment supporting

the cooperative handling of learning objects. It

allows the distribution of LOs among different sites.

In this way it is possible to create a virtual

community which cooperates in the production of

the learning material and interact as all authors were

in the same place. In particular, CD-LOMAS

supports content authors in the creation of LOs using

cooperation or collaborative authoring. The first

approach enables authors to interact only during the

revision process and each authors produces its own

individual content. Differently, in collaborative

authoring the concept of ownership becomes

irrelevant and authors work together.

CD-LOMAS enables the composition of a LO,

supporting the reuse of existing LOs spread among

the various repositories. Authors are assisted in

creating and updating LOs following the standard

SCORM and in sharing information.

The proposed system has been designed starting

from two open source applications, (RELOAD,

2006) and its Web version, (WELOAD, 2006). In

particular, CD-LOMAS reuses the features offered

by these applications for composing LOs, for

inserting the associated metadata and for browsing

LOs. These features have been extended with the

capability of performing these operations also when

the component objects are scattered on different CD-

LOMAS repositories of the network.

CD-LOMAS emphasises the LO life cycle by

associating the users with the different operations

they can perform on each LO. This feature, together

with the resource permissions definition and

management, enables to reuse existing LOs and to

cooperate in the creation of new materials. The

owner of a Learning Object can describe the

permissions related to it, and provide different kind

of usage for several users.

Quality management is also supported by

associating each LO with a standard template and an

inspection checklist to be validated during the

review process. Each template can be customised for

a specific LO.

The support for cooperation is provided through

typical configuration management features. In fact,

CD-LOMAS enables groups of people to work on

the same LO, depending on their roles. Different

users can access the same LO according to a lock-

based policy or concurrently, if branch versions of

the same LO are allowed by the LO owner.

Moreover, the system has been enriched with

features to deal with some of the most common

problems faced by cooperative environments, in

particular context awareness and communication

among users. A first context-awareness level is

given by the possibility to see at any time the people

who are working/using a LO. Context awareness is

supported through event notifications: teachers using

a LO are notified whenever relevant events happen

to such LO. An example of such events is the

creation of a newer version.

Figure 1: The CD-LOMAS architecture.

Events notification provides a solution to the

isolation problem for resources working on the same

LO in different workspaces (De Lucia et Al., 2004).

In fact, context awareness allows to identify

potential conflicts before they occur, because the

system is able to notify interested resources as soon

as a LO is checked-out and potentially before

substantial modifications have been applied to it.

4 THE PROPOSED

ARCHITECTURE

The CD-LOMAS architecture, as depicted in Figure

1, is composed of two kinds of systems: the Global

LOR Management System (GLOR) and the Local

LOR Management System (LLOR). This two level

architecture allows the access to learning materials

distributed among several LLORs by referring only

to a GLOR. Hiding to the user the structure of the

network enables to easily add new nodes, obtaining

scalability by distribution.

The basic functionality of a LLOR is to store

learning objects in a SCORM format.

The GLOR assigns to each teacher a workspace,

an area reserved to him/her, where (s)he manages

the contents to create courses in a cooperative or

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standalone way. The workspace is allocated on the

nearest or less overloaded LLOR.

The GLOR supervises the access to the resources

stored at LLOR level. In particular, the GLOR

system manages the LOs lifecycles basing on events

generated during the cooperative or standalone LOs

creation process. It also enables users to search the

distributed repository and to access, depending on

the user permissions and role, to the required LOs.

Figure 2: The CD-LOMAS Global LOR Management

System.

In particular, as depicted in Figure 2, the Global

LOR Management System is decomposed into five

subsystems:

• The LO Management subsystem which poses a

great emphasis to the LO life cycle by

associating to the user the different operations

that can be performed on a LO and the role

assignment, such as content creator, reviewer,

approver. It is responsible of the critical

functionalities needed to perform effective

collaboration in authoring and using LOs:

access to shared information, check-in and

check-out, locking and version control.

Moreover, the LO Management subsystem

provides support for the definition of LO types

with related standard templates and for a

checklist-based inspection and review phase of

the LO life cycle.

• The Event Engine has in charge of collecting

and dispatching events concerning a LO. Users

can subscribe particular events concerning LO

and courses (such as the production, updating or

deletion of a LO, or the publication of a LO on a

given subject), thus increasing the context-

awareness level. The Event Engine notifies

interesting events to the subscribed users of the

CD-LOMAS system.

• The User Management subsystem manages

users, their access permissions on different LOs

and their roles in accessing CD-LOMAS

services.

• The Administration subsystem provides several

administration features, such as adding or

deleting a LLOR, security and reporting.

• Access to the database is achieved through the

functionalities offered by the Database Broker,

which accepts queries from each client,

forwards these queries to the databases on the

LLORs, collects the results and returns a ranked

list to the user.

The Local LOR Management System stores LOs

and courses and contains the teachers workspaces.

When a LO is ready to be published it is transferred

in the course repository of the teacher, locally

handled, and is available to be deployed.

Figure 3: The Local LOR Management System.

This system provides two web services: the

retrieval of some LOs, the browsing of the LO

catalog. The access of a logged user to its workspace

is performed using http protocol.

As shown in Figure 3, it includes the Extended

Weload component which has been obtained

extending RELOAD and its Web version,

WELOAD, as described in Section 3.

Each user can compose LOs into a personal

workspace, using the LO Editor offered by the

Extended Weload component. This editor enables

the composition of a SCORM LO using local assets,

local LOs or existing LOs spread trough the

network.

Figure 4 shows the screenshot of the Extended

Weload feature enabling to compose a SCORM

package. The required standard Metadata are

manually added to the object description.

The Event Handler subsystem is responsible of

generating and dispatching events about LOs. Events

are used to signal the GLOR about the life cycle of a

LO, and to enforce the user context awareness about

interesting LOs.

The LLOR also includes the Course Handler

component, providing simple LMS features to

CD-LOMAS: A COLLABORATIVE DISTRIBUTED LEARNING OBJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

compose a course by selecting LOs available in the

user workspace or hosted on other LLORs.

An example of a scenario of the system usage is the

following, referring to Figure 1:

1. the client A logs in the GLOR;

2. the GLOR, depending on the user permission,

gives to it the access his/her workspace on the

LLOR A;

3. The user composes a LO using the extended

Weload Editor and asks to access to a LO on a

selected subject;

4. the LLOR address the query to the GLOR

Database Broker;

5. the GLOR Database Broker forwards the query

to the databases on the LLORs;

6. the GLOR Database Broker collects the results;

7. GLOR Database Broker returns a ranked list to

the user LLOR;

8. the user selects a LO hosted on LLOR C;

9. the user plays the selected LO by using the LO

player of the LLOR C;

10. The user download the LO in its workspace

hosted by the LLOR A.

Figure 4: SCORM Content Package creation.

5 SUPPORTING COOPERATION

AND COLLABORATION

The administrator of a learning organization can

define several LO types according to the standards

provided by CD-LOMAS. This enables the content

authors of an organization to produce the same kind

of LOs. Besides a standard template, a checklist can

be associated to a LO type and used during the

review phase of a LO of that type. The adoption of a

review phase assures that the repository contents are

only LOs having good instructional value.

Reviewers can be assigned manually by the GLOR

administrator or automatically by selecting them

from a reviewer list depending on the LO subject.

The subject of a LO is taken from a thesaurus.

Critical factors to effective collaboration

includes check-in, check-out, locking and version

control.

CD-LOMAS LOs follow the general life cycle

depicted in Figure 5. The owner of the LO uploads

the template and the checklist selected by the

administrator of the learning organization. He /she

defines permissions of resources to work on the LO

and activates it.

Once a LO is activated, several draft versions of

this LO can be created and maintained. When a LO

is scheduled, the LO owner can decide if branches

are allowed during its production. If branches are not

allowed, each resource can lock the LO (check-out)

and work on it until a new version is uploaded and

checked-in. Otherwise, different branches can be

produced and worked independently by each

resource, which can also produce different versions

of each branch. When all branches are closed, they

can be merged in a new version of the LO.

Completed non-branch versions of a LO undergo the

revision process and are either approved generating

a baseline or sent back to the draft state.

Figure 5: Learning Object lifecycle.

In Figure 6 the LO card is shown, describing

information concerning the LO name, its status,

whether branch are allowed and the number of

branches currently active. During the Check-In

operation it is possible to import a LO from the user

workspace, from the distributed repository, or to

upload a new object in standard SCORM from the

local computer. Whether the imported file does not

respect the standard SCORM an alert message is

provided.

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Figure 6: LO Card and Check-In source selection.

5.1 Handling Object Permissions and

Composition

When a LO is checked-in the LO owner decides the

permission (s)he gives to other systems users. In

particular, (s)he can decide to globally share a LO

with all other users, or only with a specific subset of

global roles (i.e., teacher or students) or (s)he can fix

local users roles that can access the owned LO (i.e.,

students frequenting his/her course). The LO owner

can also assign to each role several reuse

capabilities, such as locked reuse, the LO is reused

unchanged, derivative reuse, the LO can be

downloaded in the user workspace and modified,

and, finally, (s)he can allow only to receive the

description of the object in a ranked list. In the last

case the system provides support to the interested

user in asking the permission to use or reference

LOs to the LO owner. The LO owner finds the

request in a Feedback section of its workspace.

It is important to point out that the system offers

several permission possibilities, but to success in

applying a unified content strategy (Rockley, 2002)

authors should work together and no own any part of

an object. When several authors decide to cooperate

in the creation of an entire course with other authors,

a course project is created by one of them and a

collaborative workspace is associated to the team.

All members can create LOs in this space. In this

environment authors work together aiming at

ensuring that content is not written more than once

by more authors. Check-in, check-out, event

notification, locking and versioning are still applied,

but all the users have the same permissions on the

objects of the team.

Concerning the hierarchical composition of a LO,

several fine grained configuration management

systems have been proposed in literature, such as

Coop/Orm (Magnusson and Asklund, 1996), CoEd

(Bendix et Al, 1997) and ADAMS (De Lucia et Al.,

2004). Similarly to ADAMS, we handle composite

LOs by using hierarchical dependencies.

Figure 7: Versioning of composite Los.

When a LO is created, it can be composed using

existing LOs spread on the various LLORs.

Following the definition of LOs described in the

standard SCORM, leaves are associated with assets,

while internal nodes define LOs. Therefore,

operations that can be performed on internal LOs

just aim at modifying the LO composition

(adding/deleting sub-LOs). Operations on internal

LOs cannot be performed in branch mode; rather,

each time an internal LO is locked for an updating

operation, sub-LOs are locked too as well as higher

level LOs. As shown in Figure 7, each time a new

version of a sub-LO is created, a new version of

higher level LOs is created too, to maintain

consistency and record the operations made on each

LO.

This approach enables the cooperative

development of learning contents. Indeed, each user

is able to access a LO component without locking

the entire LO or using superfluous branches.

CD-LOMAS also supports LO reuse when a LO

is checked-out from a user different from the owner

CD-LOMAS: A COLLABORATIVE DISTRIBUTED LEARNING OBJECT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

with the permission of derivative reuse. When the

object is checked-in the user of the new object can

create a variant of the original object whether there

exists a small number of differences between the

two objects and metadata do not have been

substantially modified. Differently, if the

modifications are substantial a new object is created

with a new owner.

Let us note that a SCORM LO is packed in zip

format. To reuse and compose LOs structured as zip

packet is complex. Thus, we decide to entirely apply

the standard, but to store the LOs without pack them.

The components of a LO are stored in the local

Database and the packet is created only when the LO

is exported.

5.2 Supporting Context Awareness

One of the most common problems faced by

cooperative environments and distributed

development teams concerns the context awareness.

Even when supported by configuration management

tools, such teams quickly suffer of the isolation

problem occurring when different people are

involved in the development of the same (or

correlated) LOs within different workspaces. CD-

LOMAS supports context awareness to enables the

teacher community to create shareable contents. In

particular, context awareness is mainly supported

through event notifications: i.e., messages generated

in response to specific events triggered by one of the

subsystems of CD-LOMAS.

Event notification in CD-LOMAS adopts a

publish-subscriber paradigm: as soon as an event

concerning a LO occurs, the users who subscribed

such event are notified. CD-LOMAS increases the

context awareness without overloading a teacher or a

learner with useless event messages. To this aim, a

user can selectively specify the events concerning a

LO (s)he needs to be notified of. In particular, (s)he

can require to be informed about events having a

direct impact on the LO (s)he is working on, or

events concerning all the LO referring to a specific

topics, as well as on specific LOs. (S)he can also

requires to be informed when variants of a LO is

checked-in. To avoid a message overloading CD-

LOMAS offers the possibility to select the right

level of notification needed by the users.

As an example, in order to prevent the isolation

problem, a teacher can choose to be notified as soon

as LOs (s)he is interested in are allocated or

checked-out, but (s)he can also be only interested on

meaningful changes applied to other teachers LOs,

or in changes that impact on object referred in

his(her) course space.

In this way the notifications are targeted on the

specific user needs still minimizing the number or

subscription requested to the learning content

authors/users and the number of unimportant

messages they receive, resulting in a good

compromise between an adequate context-awareness

level and an endurable quantity of messages

received.

By default, all the LOs allocated to a content

author are intended to be fully subscribed (all events

concerning the LO are notified), whereas all the

other LOs are intended as unsubscribed. However

each author can override such behaviour specifying

for each LO the most appropriate notification level.

6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper we have presented CD-LOMAS, a

system for the management of distributed Learning

Object Repository. The main feature of the system is

the possibility of cooperate in the creation complex

Learning Objects choosing the elements to be

composed by searching the didactic material

available on other CD-LOMAS sites. Event-based

notification provides support to the teachers that

want to be informed on modification made on user

interesting learning objects, improving context-

awareness.

A CD-LOMAS prototype has been implemented

using PHP and Mysql. A configuration composed of

one Global LOR and two Local LOR on different

PCs is going to be experimented. In particular, we

are adopting CD-LOMAS during the three parallel

classrooms of the Software Engineering course

offered by the Computer Science Program of the

University of Salerno. Two of them have been

located on the same Local LOR.

The adopted distribution strategy depends on the

frequency and locality of references to LOs. The

preliminary experience reveled that updating of local

LOs are more frequent than searching or

downloading of LOs on different LLOR. We plan to

experiment the proposed system on a more large

scale, involving other universities as users and

content providers and to verify the network

workload.

Because the LMS features offered by the system

are very simple, we are going to integrate the CD-

LOMAS in Moodle (Moodle, 2006) by creating an

ad hoc plug-in. In this way the community of user

and the production of contents will grow more

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

quickly. We also plan to enhance the searching

capabilities by using more advanced information

retrieval models and techniques.

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