A service-oriented reference architecture for mobile learning environments

Even providing several benefits and facilities with regard to teaching and learning, the development of mobile learning environments present problems and challenges that must be investigated, especially with respect to the definition and adoption of architectural patterns. Indeed, most of these environments are built in an isolated way, having their own architectures and structures, which can negatively affect the capacity to standardization and support of architectural definition. Motivated by this scenario, in this paper we propose a service-oriented reference architecture for mobile learning environments. This architecture, named Ref-mLearning, aims at contributing to the development, reuse and interoperability of such environments, also allowing an increase in quality and cost reduction during their development. Ref-mLearning was developed according to a systematic process for the definition of reference architectures, and has been evaluated by means of a reference model for reference architectures. The preliminary results obtained suggest that Ref-mLearning is complete, presenting most of the relevant elements with respect to a reference architecture.