A Single Sign-on Mechanism for Authenticating Users across a Distributed Web-based Learning Environment

As learning management systems and learning object repositories are two separate concerns, it often makes sense to make them together. In previous work, we presented a tiered architecture that includes a middle layer for communication and exchange of learning objects between these two kinds of system, but we set up a basic and static authentication mechanism to identify users and their roles across the whole learning environment. In this paper, we suggest a dynamic way to authenticate users by exploiting a model driven approach together with a distributed architecture based on Web services. While offering a single sign-on process, this work can be extended to any other learning system such as authoring tools. Our authentication framework is also able to take into account users coming from various institutions or organizations, thus bringing scalability