Durchgängiges Identity-Management und interoperable E-Portfolios zur Unterstützung lebenslangen Lernens

The transformation of our society into a knowledge society has made lifelong learning and education in general the predominant topics. Various education initiatives and statistics initiated by politicians emphasize the necessity of sustainable knowledge management. The global labour market also confronts people with completely new challenges. The technological progress and short half-life of knowledge must be considered correspondingly and accounted for in personal life and learning schemes. This is the reason for supporting people in their learning process and creating IT-based preconditions for sustainably accessible knowledge. This thesis starts out from this interface between human beings and machines. It introduces an architectural model (and its technical implementation) that –through the connection to the corresponding digital identity– provides knowledge, learning histories, learning artefacts and multi-media learning contents in the form of electronic portfolios (E-Portfolios) induced by the user. The designed web system, an E-Portfolio Management System (EPMS), provides a flexible interface over which existing web applications may be connected for the exchange of E-Portfolios and their contents. The integration of innovative Identity Management technologies enables the use of existing user accounts, offers a Web Single Sign-on and creates the necessary relation of trust between the applications through federated structures. Through the consolidation of digital identities over the EPMS, an unprecedented infrastructure available for life for the use of E-Portfolios is put into practice. Over the EPMS presented here, personal knowledge and acquired skills may be made accessible in the form of digital files and may be linked with existing IT systems. Thus, technical possibilities for constant knowledge management will be enabled. Research projects that deal with learning technologies and the possibilities to learn with the help of computers/the Internet emphasize the integration of learning systems into existing IT infrastructures as the central success element. This has proved to be right and indispensable in everyday deployment. E-Portfolios are to be seen in the E-Learning context. Hence, the link between existing systems is also an essential issue for an EPortfolio system, which is covered by the EPMS presented in this thesis. Classic Identity Management approaches and federated scenarios which already exist as so-called authentication and authorisation infrastructures at universities will be looked at. The consideration of standards and the usage of interoperable technologies play as important a role as security and data protection.