Need for interoperable interfaces and data formats

The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, first and foremost its institute Fraunhofer FOKUS, is working on a number of research and development projects related to educational technologies. The most important preliminary work for the project in this context is the CLM. In the past, for example, about 50 teaching/learning technologies were implemented as isolated solutions by the individual Fraunhofer institutes, which were not compatible with each other until now. These are to be united in a common infrastructure in order to address, for example, similar needs from industry. The EXPAND+ER WB³ project now offers the opportunity to further develop the CLM in the context of concrete content and user requirements by the educational service providers participating in the project.

Mediator platform for interoperable educational services

The Fraunhofer Common Learning Middleware (CLM) addresses a number of technical challenges and aims at functional-qualitative improvements throughout the education system. When designing technical education ecosystems, the CLM focuses on the needs of users and current and future infrastructures, but also on the support of existing solutions (legacy technologies). The questions addressed by CLM include:

• How to ensure an all-encompassing seamless learning experience for users without technical barriers or switching Systems based on the fragmented education technology market?
• How can an interoperable and flexible educational infrastructure be built in the sense of the best-of-breed paradigm, while avoiding dependencies on individual providers and services and lock-in effects?
• How can different widely used standards and specifications, e.g. in terms of course descriptions, media and metadata, interfaces for accessing content and services, activity data, and acquired skills and competencies, be built upon without forcibly excluding existing systems with open interfaces?
• How can data (e.g., course descriptions, access, profile, competency, or usage data) necessary for the operation of many distributed educational services be shared securely and yet interoperably between them?
• How can synergies be created between horizontal and vertical educational services (e.g., in the creation of content and the operation of technical components) between different educational institutions?

How it works

The CLM is based on open standards and specifications for educational technologies, including standardized interface definitions and persistent activity data, metadata specifications for content structures, and learning objects for knowledge transfer and review. It has been developed as a multi-tenant component for various educational stakeholders and institutions. Through the CLM management service, the Common Learning Middleware enables the management of user roles and enrollments in learning objects or entire courses, and handles access control for learning content and services. The CLM relies on interoperable standards throughout. Accordingly, services that follow the same standards can be directly connected. These include in particular:

• User interfaces (applications, LMSes, portals, apps) that present the content and offerings orchestrated by the CLM, for end users such as learners, instructors, and organizational and administrative managers.
• Existing user directories and single sign-on solutions
• Databases for storing e.g. profile, enrollment or activity data (in particular learning record stores)
• Repositories/databases for learning materials, which provide media and meta-data
• Other services (service providers) that provide interactive or adaptive learning content: e.g. VR/AR services, learning analytics components, AI systems, competency management, personal certificates/credentials, portfolio management, HR tools, etc.

In the underlying concept, elements to be offered to users in the applications, be it a text, an image, a video, a dashboard or a virtual reality, are abstracted as a learning object (also launchable object or tool). The offering servers, which provide media and services for the infrastructure, act as service providers and can register their offerings in the middleware (publish / subscribe). A launchable object can be connected via the interfaces of the middleware in a standard-compliant manner and made known to the application. Accordingly, the object is not copied to another server system, but is retrieved directly from the original service provider.

CLM in the EXPAND+ER WB³ project

The project focuses on the competencies of the users. On the one hand, the so-called ACTUAL competencies already acquired are stored in a personal user profile. This user profile can be maintained manually by the participants and supplemented by educational certificates at the end of successful course participation. Users have full control over their data and can decide for themselves with which platforms they share which data and which platforms are allowed to edit the user profile.

In addition, there are the TARGET competencies in the user profiles. These are the competencies that the users still want to acquire, for example, because they are necessary for a promising new job, because a corresponding need has been formulated by the employer, or because they simply correspond to the current interests of the learners.

In order to cover the TARGET competencies in the best possible way, the EXPAND+ER WB³ project uses recommendation algorithms and semantic search methods to select those courses in which the most suitable competencies are taught. For this purpose, existing course descriptions, which are based on the DEfTIS standard, for example, must be extended to include the corresponding data structures for competencies.

In the EXPAND+ER WB³ project, the Common Learning Middleware has the task of linking the systems of the educational institutions with a higher-level continuing education search platform without making them directly dependent on each other. For example, education providers can forward their course descriptions to different course databases via the CLM on the basis of the DEfTIS extension. In turn, the search platforms can cross-search for matching courses in the databases to cover the TARGET competencies of their users. The course descriptions delivered by the databases also contain a booking link as a deep link, so that interested parties are forwarded directly to the education provider for booking. If the search platform and the education provider offer the same single sign-on mechanism, no separate registration of the user is necessary. After successful completion of the course, the acquired competencies can be stored in the personal educational biography (e.g. in the EUROPASS profile) and thus be made accessible to the search platform for the next personalized search.

Tests & trials

FOKUS collected extensive feedback and ideas from the partners in various workshops. These were then addressed in a first draft of the platform functionality, e.g. through platform wireframes. Furthermore, existing educational platforms were researched to be informed about best practices and state-of-the-art developments in this area. In addition, the course structure of the WDB database was analyzed and an efficient integration of existing courses into the continuing education search platform was planned.