A Service Component Architecture to Federate E-Universities: A Case Study in Virtual Mobility

Global networking, digital knowledge media, and novel e-learning technologies challenge a fundamental renovation of contemporary universities as these factors strongly affect the way educational institutions create and impart knowledge. Universities need to co-operate and aggregate their learning resources and core competencies to reduce costs, and to be able to rapidly respond to changing conditions on an emerging international education market. It is argued that service-oriented computing offers appropriate computational constructs enabling inter-operation of today’s heterogeneous university infrastructures to agile networks of collaborating applications. For a case study about virtual mobility of students, in the sense that students can custom-design their curriculum by combining e-learning offers from different providers, a service component architecture (SCA) is proposed. SCA is a novel engineering model created by an on-going industry-led standardisation consortium aiming to facilitate the development of coarse-grained service-oriented applications. The work builds on the outcome of a European project, CUBER, in which a personalised curriculum builder was produced, but offered no possibility to execute cross-institutional study programmes based on automated processes.