| Popis: |
The way someone perceives e-learning is the way that person is going to use it. To many e- learning practitioners, e-learning is still perceived through the Learning management systems. They are the ones that are influencing, whether we want it or not, the instructional design process and the way how the learning content and activities are going to be presented. Often, Learning management systems in their ?tools?, ?modules? and ? blocks? don?t contain all needed functionalities. So, in a typical higher education institution, other applications such as portals, e-libraries, student information systems etc. should be used as well. Adding more and more mission critical applications and systems in an unorganised way can present a great problem to everyone involved in teaching and learning at a HE institution and slow down wider institutional adoption of e-learning. Teachers and students need to remember always new Web URLs, usernames and passwords? Students miss important deadlines marked as calendar entries in one of the systems, not being able to keep up with information and course activities appearing in different course shells of different LMS?s, portals and intranets, scattered all over the e-learning and information archipelago. This can end up in users being deeply unsatisfied with technical infrastructure. Connecting those isolated application islands is a first step to make all those systems and applications more useful and bring a new life and meaning to all of them. In some cases systems will share and synchronise data. In others, they will ?trust? each other enough to let users go from one to another without the need to re-authenticate, or visualise data retrieved from other systems. Finding the optimal integration solution is often not easy and depends on many parameters, especially the ?openness? of systems in regard to integration with other systems, their compliance to relevant international standards, and sometimes too strict institutional policies about the protection of personal information |
