Cloud Interoperability Service Architecture for Education Environments

MOOC adoption is growing, and several challenges are presented with it. One of them is the use of innovative tools for learning, with a special emphasis in having learners to represent their acquired knowledge in creative forms; therefore, some experiences in that regard will be introduced. Thus, orchestrating the learning experience with cloud-based external tools (realized as Web 2.0 tools) brings interoperability issues such as automated management of tools and interoperability scalability. This paper presents a new version of an architecture that is capable of interoperability with external tools by defining a semantic description of the tools' Web API using linked data. This creates the next generation of tool interoperability for educational environments. Furthermore, it makes machine discovery of the Web API possible; therefore, it does not require custom system interfaces to interoperate. It simplifies the plugging in of new external tools and maintenance of integrated services. Additionally, the architecture makes it possible to automate simple and complex tasks to be performed with the external tools, such as creating thousands of tool instances to be used by MOOC learners. The results are very promising and demonstrate that this approach is innovative, scalable and highly accurate. Currently, no standard, specification or framework has the same type of flexibility, integration simplicity and robust management for external tools.