Creating e-learning web services towards reusability of functionalities in creating e-learning systems

Many educational and training institutions acquired proprietary e-Learning systems which are tailored-made and difficult to reuse in the development process of new systems. This paper aims to look into the issue of reusability of the functionalities in the e-Learning domain. The functionalities that span across many e-Learning systems (common functionalities) can be built as reusable components by using Web services and the implementation of these services enables the reuse of the functionalities . A pool of e-Learning Web services is built and allows to provide functionalities to the various e-learning systems. These e-learning Web services are described by using an ontology which takes into account the functionalities´ characteristics of elearning platforms. The aim is to allow developers to find them automatically. Following that, instead of building from scratch, the development of future e-Learning systems will involve assembling the suitable functionalities from Web services´ set related to e-Learning. This will tremendously reduce the time, effort and cost needed in building new e-Learning systems.