Learning Matrix Case Study

Overview

The projects aim is to enable non-traditional students considering progression to higher education to access appropriate learning opportunities from a partnership of further education/higher education providers via a standards-based electronic interface. 

The project is to provide a set of services to allow pre-higher education and other students to access learning packages offered by learning providers, register on courses and access resources. The packages will help prepare students for higher education courses. There will be support for students to place results for each student in a progress file which will later form the basis of an e-portfolio. Students will use PDP (personal development planning) and the resulting records will be placed in a personal files. There will be an infrastructure (Shibboleth) to allow access to resources with a single sign on.

Projects Aims and Objectives

Developing an underlying framework and architecture to allow multiple Learning providers to present their learning opportunities to groups of learners from a single learner portal, and keep a record of these learners' achievements.
To pilot this framework with a service offering small "Higher Education Taster" modules for non-traditional Higher Education potential entrants so that they may have an insight into the courses.

Approach Adopted

The technical solution was the ioNode approach. Some principles were important, namely:

Each provider owns and retains administrative control of their offerings and the learners taking them (ie this is not a shared pool)
Although the technology would work best with a fuller integration with institutional systems, it was left up to each institution how closely they wanted to link with their ioNode, they could manually transfer data, or develop more automated approaches.

The design approach: 

• Part of the approach was to use, use case analysis and to get a requirements and a specifications document from the client.We had meetings with the client and went through prototypes to establish project results.

• Extreme Programming - Extreme Programming (or XP) is a software engineering methodology, the most prominent of several agile software development methodologies, prescribing a set of daily stakeholder practices that embody and encourage particular values.

• The waterfall model - this is a sequential software development model (a process for the creation of software) in which development is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases of requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing (validation), integration, and maintenance.

Why this approach was chosen

Firstly for flexibility in that we could imagine different services all using the same basic approach.
Secondly, this allows a gentle curve that doesn't seem too radical or difficult for administrators and IT staff.
In terms of technology we used ioNodes because it is built in an interoperable system based on plugin transformations, and the suitability for building networks and linking providers and learners.
This came immediately after the SHELL project so we were keen to win the users respect and trust.
We decided to do lots of test cases and wrote and developed the product in HTML as a template for this purpose.
The user scenario’s that were created for this project were very helpful.
A question model was also used.

Tools and Techniques used

• Eclipse

• Tomcat - Webserver

• Apache - Webserver

• Postgres - Backend Database

• Ioportal

• Java

• UML

• Refactored ioNode

What worked well

• The Prototyping of the product.

• Communication with the client.

• Use Cases.

• Hands on project manager

• Having previous Lucid Experience

• A Technical background

What would I do differently if repeating and why

This project was very successful but:

• We could have focused our work more as someparts of the project were over worked.

• We could have had more user testing before the live user testing.