FIE2010: Orchestrating Groupware in Engineering Education
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This document proposes an architectural approach to orchestrate online engineering education courses using third-party tools. It involves a central execution engine that runs course scripts written in an Educational Modeling Language (EML). This engine acts as an orchestra director that controls the behavior of multiple groupware tools in accordance with the course script. It also involves a middleware to integrate these third-party tools. The authors developed a prototype to test this approach, with the execution engine as a Java-based web app and authoring/monitoring interfaces as Moodle extensions. Their approach differs from related work by using an EML to support social collaboration over third-party tools and a method to integrate legacy engineering education tools.
FIE2010: Orchestrating Groupware in Engineering Education
- 1. Roberto Perez-Rodriguez Manuel Caeiro-Rodriguez Luis Anido-Rifon University of Vigo
- 2. Introduction ICT support to Engineering Education increased in recent years: Big spectrum of online tools and materials From basic web sites to online labs The implementation of online courses that involve groups of users is a challenging task due to The scattering of third-party tools running on different servers These tools need to be configured manually for each use case
- 3. Introduction (ii) Our approach to solve this issue is composed by two main points A central engine that runs course scripts written with an Educational Modelling Language (EML) A middleware to enable the integration of third-party tools in courses This solution is usually referred to as orchestration A central engine acts as the orchestra director And controls the behaviour of multiple musicians (groupware tools) In accordance with a previously composed partiture (the course script)
- 5. PoEML The life-cycle of a collaborative practice in Engineering Education is typically composed of the following stages The design-time stage, in which the teacher creates the roadmap of the practice, including the number of participants per scenario The instantiation-time stage, in which the teacher communicates the assignment of people to groups and the collaborative practice starts The run-time stage, in which participants collaborate following the instructions in the roadmap, at the same time that the teacher monitors the progression of groups
- 6. PoEML (ii) We use PoEML for designing educational scenarios. In design-time, the creator of the collaborative practice uses a graphical authoring tool that produces a XML file with a computer-understandable description of the practice
- 7. PoEML (iii) We propose an example of a collaborative practice. The participants are asked to make groups of two, then they have to code a Java program using a development environment and to compose a text file with a summary of the work, finally the program and the summary are evaluated by a teacher. The elements of the practice are: Scenarios: a root scenario that represents the entire class, and a scenario for each group Goals: the objective and roadmap of the practice Environments: the programming environment, the feedback environment, the delivering environment, the evaluation environment Tools: the programming IDE, a chat for communication between peers, a text editor, a forum for feedback Participants: grouped in groups of two This practice entails to create instances of the tools that will be used by participants: The number of IDE instances to be created depends on the number of groups of participants, so as the number of text editor instances to compose the summary Tool instances must be configured prior to be used by participants
- 9. Execution engine (ii) The execution engine is the core component of the system. The models manager deals with the designs of educational scenarios. Maintains the versions of the models Updates models when required by an authorized user Communication from the exterior is made by making use of the authoring interface The instances is in charge of managing running instances of collaborative practices. Communication is made by making use of both the information retrieval interface as well as the events interface
- 10. Integration middleware The Generic Tool Adapter (GTA) is a comprehensible mechanism to extend the functionalities of a e- learning system by integrating tools in a “tight” way. The following aspects are covered: Authorization granting Instances management Data transfer Permissions assignment Event subscription Specific methods management
- 11. Prototype We developed a fully functional prototype to test the architectural approach presented in this paper. The database was implemented in Oracle. The execution engine is a Java-based web app running on Tomcat The presentation component was developed as a Moodle extension (new course type) The authoring subcomponent provides the view for creating new process definitions, which are incorporated to the models schema in the database The monitoring subcomponent provides the view for following the progression of participants through the collaboration structures The delivering subcomponent provides the working view for participants, including a to-do list that provides links to the pending assignments
- 12. Prototype (ii)
- 13. Related work SocialWok adds a social layer over Google Docs Simplifies the process of sharing a document with other people because it is a social network that wraps around documents Provides the capability to define users’ groups Limits access to documents to a group of users Zoho is a web-based productivity suite that has integrated its products with Google. Google Apps Premier and Education Edition allows to create and manage groups, and to share documents Moodlerooms is a SaaS provider of Moodle, and it integrates Moodle and Google Apps together with a single-sign-on
- 14. Related work (ii) Our work differs from those in two main points: We use an EML to support the social layer over third- party tools, enabling framed collaboration Since laboratory simulators and other kind of tools in Engineering Education have been developed without integration concerns in mind, we provide a method to integrate these kind of third-party tools, which are wrapped and treated as legacy software
- 15. Conclusions We have presented an architectural approach to support an EML layer over groupware tools that are used in Engineering Education. The EML engine automatically configures and instantiates third-party groupware tools following a previously designed course script Our approach is, basically, to formalize macro collaboration scripts as a process definition, whilst micro collaboration scripts are reified in the code of groupware tools.
- 16. Thanks for your attention!