MMS: a user-centric portal for e-learning

Recent years have seen an increasing social, political and economic emphasis on the use of e-learning methodologies that hold out the promise of wider access, higher quality and lower costs. There are now a plethora of proprietary platforms - some commercial and closed, some homegrown and open - whose only common feature is their incompatibility with each other. Recently, the notion of a portal has gained credence as a guiding technical principle that can be used to integrate diverse information services and provide an organisational focus. Portals promise a common environment and single access point for everyone from anonymous Web site visitors to indentured users of e-learning resources. In 1999 the UK JISC Committee on Integrated Learning Environments (JCIEL) was formed in recognition of the need for understanding integration issues. INSIDE, an Institutionally Secure Integrated Data Environment was one of several projects sponsored by the JCIEL programme. It proposed the creation of a user-centric portal that provided managed learning functionality for academic staff and their students. The result, which is described in this paper, is MMS, a module management system.