A Methodological Approach to Encourage the Service-Oriented Learning Systems Development

The basic idea of service-oriented learning is that a learning environment should be conceived as a set of independent units of learning packaged as learning services. The design, development and deployment of a learning system based on integrating different learning services needs both a technological platform to support the system as well as a methodology that manages the development process. Such technological platform is provided by the Service-Oriented Learning Architecture (SOLA). SOLA proposes an architecture style, which defines how to deploy several units of packeged-learning services. The purpose of this paper is to review the SOLA concept and to present a specific method based on specifying instructional domains, to complement the SOLA approach. Our method suggests the definition of a feature model, which represents the characteristics of the instructional domain, in order to address the identification and clasiffication of candidate services. The approach here proposed facilitates the definition of candidate-learning services in order to enhance the integration of such services.