Provision of Pedagogical Resources in Service-Oriented Instructional Environments

Compared to the current approach of delivering instructional materials to learners in Web-based learning environments, the service-oriented instructional processes bring benefits in multiple facets. To realize the concept of service-oriented instructional processes, the capability of dynamically searching and binding pedagogical services is inevitable. However, linking remote services results in more latency, which will undermine learning experience and thus needs to be minimized. It is rational to support cache for holding metadata of available instructional resources locally. Besides the cache mechanism, subscription and syndication of pedagogical resourcespsila metadata also will make the implementation of service-oriented instructional processes more practical and efficient. This paper aims to clarify the corresponding design principles and propose the reference architecture for realizing the concept.