In this paper we present Zenaminer, a software architecture for linking the SCORM standard to the Linked Open Data cloud. The main idea is to overcome some limitations of the SCORM Content Packaging standard, the most used standard for sharing e-learning contents, in order to migrate this material into the Web of Data. We analyze the design of a RESTful Web Service for SCORM where each single SCO (Sharable Content Object) is exposed on the web as raw data that can be created, read, updated, and deleted through the HTTP protocol. In addition, borrowing the idea from the concept of web mashup, we propose to build the Learning Management System interface as a mashup that uses Zenaminer web API to access SCO data and that customizes the presentation and interaction with the help of additional CSS and Javascript. To achieve this goal, for the creation of the HTML material, we suggest to use a “light formalism” defined by the W3C with the name Slidy so that the presentation remains separated from the content. Finally, Zenaminer allow users to enrich the SCORM resources with comments. Comments can be contents themselves that extend and improve the original material of the teacher. Unstructured comments are automatically annotated with Spotlight linking them to the LOD cloud through DBpedia.
The evolution of digital communications and the more and more relevant
presence of the Web in our society lead to significant changes also in the e-learning
scenario. A new term is being used to define this change, “e-learning 2.0” [
These ideas are not new at all in the e-learning scenario. Here, teaching material is defined in the form of micro contents named Sharable Content Objects (SCO). SCOs form the basis of usability, interoperability, and adaptation. They are the building blocks that can be independently produced, stored, indexed, composed and evaluated. SCOs can be considered a compromise between raw data (e.g., image, video, audio, text) and a whole lesson: they have a context, but small, so they can flexibly arranged to form new lessons or presented in a different shape changing the appearance of their elements (e.g., logos, titles, etc.). For example, in this work we have defined a SCO as a group of slides on the same topic inside a lesson. Thus, the production of teaching material implies the production of a number of SCOs that can be collected to create an archive of sharable micro contents. Nevertheless, no services have been defined to migrate this information into the Web of Data. SCOs are shared as documents, ZIP archives, that a user need to download and extract before being able to use them in a new project.
The paradigm of the ”Web as a Platform” [
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. A review of the current state of the art is presented in Section 2. The key ideas of our approach, with some details on the issues of exporting SCORMs by means of a REST web service, are described in Section 3. Then, in Section 4, we discuss the concept of separation of concerns, which is at the basis of our tool. In Section 5 we describe the architecture of the web service and, finally, in Section 6 the use case used to test our work. Conclusions follow in Section 7 where we stress on the benefits introduced by the tool into the e-learning community. 2
E-learning systems has assumed an important role in the Web community for the important value of the contents which they shared. In this context, contents are named sharable content objects (SCO) and they hold information about lectures and metadata useful to describe better the inferred contents. Based on the assumption that the Web provides the best opportunity to maximize both access to and the reuse of learning contents, the overall objective of these systems are to make sharable content objects usable, reusable and interoperable. In order to address this, our goals are to define and to implement a model to export teaching materials adhering the Web of Data.
Many efforts has been spent to make SCORM environment interoperable3
within the Web cloud. Many of them focused to make interoperable LMSs in a
cloud infrastructure [
Vossen and Westerkamp [
about making the integration as simple and cost effective as technologically possible.
SCORM, i.e., the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, is a reference model for the creation of web-based e-learning material with the objective to ensure interoperability, reusability, and accessibility. The SCORM content packaging section specifies how the course material should be packaged, usually in a ZIP file, and described. The course is defined as a collection of Sharable Content Objects (SCOs) that can be associated to a lesson or a part of it. A Content Object must be a web-deliverable learning unit, that is usually designed as an HTML page with CSS and Javascript so that it can be launched in a web browser.
SCORM packages are managed by a Learning Management System (LMS) that, among other important functions such as administration, tracking, and reporting, provides also a mean to display this information to the users. In order to correctly deliver the contents, the LMS parses the package metadata to understand the course structure, known as the “activity tree”, and to know how to launch each SCO. Since most of times the material takes the form of slides, “traditional” LMS use a fixed HTML frameset structure, as shown in Fig. 3, that includes a list of the available lessons, a set of navigation buttons, and a panel where the slides are shown. – The SCO designer can completely define the content and presentation of each single SCO, but it can not control at all the interface used to present and navigate it (that is part of the LMS functions); – The SCO designer’s work area is limited by the dimension of the HTML frame defined by the LMS, thus it is difficult to integrate different media and materials, i.e., a video of the teacher, slideshows, comments; – SCOs are included in the LMS with the graphical style defined by their own SCO designer, style that can be unhomogeneous if an LMS integrates different SCO sources. If content and presentation where independent, it would be instead easy to redefine each SCO in order to present an homogeneous presentation; – A fixed interface and the impossibility to separate presentation from content make hard to adapt the interface to different displays, i.e., smartphones, tablets, netbooks, etc.
To overcome these limitations, we present Zenaminer, a web service to export SCORM packages through a RESTful web API, that is a web service implemented using HTTP and the principles of REST (REpresentational State Transfer). An architecture where a SCORM package is not shared as a single object (the ZIP packet), but as a collection of smaller objects, the SCOs, each of them accessible independently from the others. It is the implementation of the new paradigm of the “Web of Data”, SCOs are publicly available as read/write raw data that can be retrieved or updated using a REST interface as described in the next sections.
The key factors that enable Zenaminer to provide such a functionality are two: – the knowledge of the SCORM content packaging standard, to import the
ZIP files; – the knowledge of the content “internals”, i.e., how the slide information is defined, to separate the content from the presentation.
Zenaminer, for the creation of HTML documents, suggests the introduction
of a “light formalism” proposed by the W3C with the name Slidy [
In short, SCORM contents are available as resources of the web service given a specific URI. The SCO designer can freely define the interface as he likes it, then contents will be dynamically retrieved from Zenaminer using AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) calls. As illustrated in Section 5, web API give access to each single slide of the course as well as to the table of contents for the navigation. In addition Zenaminer extends the SCORM metadata to include also references to additional information such as the video recording of a lesson, synchronization information between video and slides, etc.
Taking into consideration another characteristic of what is defined as
elearning 2.0, that is collaborative learning, Zenaminer enables students to enrich
the SCORM resources with comments on the course, the lesson, or the slide.
Comments can be contents themselves that extend and improve the original
material provided by the teacher. Furthermore, unstructured comments are
automatically annotated with DBpedia Spotlight5 linking them to the Linked Open
Data cloud through DBpedia [
In order to structure the presentation of contents we adopted the Slidy formalism, which uses HTML for the description of its items. The choice to adopt HTML becomes important in our approach because it opens to all devices able to connect and visualize Web pages and, more important, it intrinsically performs the separation of contents from the presentation (also called view). According to that, we may define data able to exchange information and how this data may be used to build the presentation: this is obtained with the use of the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file. By means of it, a view maker may define models to render specific items or group of them. These models are named class and are referred to an HTML page. The interaction between HTML page and CSS is performed by means of selectors, which are able to point to specific items or class of an HTML page. In this context, the Javascript, a “scripting” language, performs the possibility to select an item or a set of them and to change the behaviour of the view, previously defined. In addition, it works as a tool to enrich dynamically the presentation, e.g. making table of contents (TOC), suggesting the value of an acronyms, changing font or window dimensions. Then, it performs an important role to dynamically access structured data without any layout details, or raw data, which are coming from different archives spread within the Web cloud. The technology that allows to gather data from external sources is the Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX).
Our work exploits the Separation of Concerns (SoC) principle, introduced above, in the context of a Learning management system. The difference between data and view allows to navigate through resources, making customizable views which better respond to the need of who provide contents (author) and who use, reuse and redistribute them (user). Data is presented without layout details, raw, but it is rich of semantics: data is stored with the information about inference to others and are exposed to users by means of REST APIs. Our approach exploits the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm, in which the view is the set of presentation rules for the data, the Model is the amount of data raw available for a generic topic, while Controller is the set of methods which are needed to create the communication channel from the Model and the View. Our data Model is deployed in the system which it holds SCORM packages, while the View is created on all user machines whenever a user require it. The Controller, instead, is located on the user machine where the view is created and on the LMS where SCORMs are available.
To provide the maximum interoperability and reusability, contents indexed and managed by our LMS are slides, lectures and courses. All of these are Web resources available by URIs time-invariant. This feature is important because we
need to performs durability and reusability to each Web resource. Slide contents are described by means of HTML Slidy formalism; each slide is composed of title, pictures, vertical and horizontal scroll bars, interactive items (buttons, check box, etc.). Lectures are organized as follows: slides and video fragments. A fragment is a part of video which is related to a particular lecture. To map lecture and fragments, we introduced a synchronization file. A video is available and accessible by means of a URI with the above requirements. Course, lecture and slide exploit the SoC principle, separating the view from the data model. The video, instead, holds the information about its presentation and it is shared without changing. 5
The architecture is structured in four building blocks that are summarized in Figure 2: 1. The REST controller is the interface between Zenaminer and the Internet.
Its features are grouped in three sets (as shown in Figure 3): user management and authentication (login), get and post of comments (comment) and management of SCORM packages (scorms, item, outline, sync and slide). Each of these features is implemented using the REST architecture, thus resources are available through URIs in the Internet. Access to REST calls that provide access to (GET) or modify (POST, PUT, DELETE) existing contents can be limited using the existing facility for user management and authentication. 2. A local validator is used to verify that (X)HTML files are valid and wellformed before they are parsed. When a new SCORM package is imported each HTML file that contains slides is validated using the remote interface offered by the official W3C validator6. 3. When a comment (an enrichment) is received it is passed to the Spotlight client. The Spotlight client sends a request to DBpedia Spotlight service and receives an annotated version of the comment. 4. The SQL Database is used to store imported SCORM packages together with comments and annotations. 2. the REST controller receives the package, unpacks and analyzes the files containing slides and sends them to the W3C validator; 3. the W3C validator validates individual files and reports the result to the
REST controller; 4. if all files have been validated correctly the package is imported into Zenaminer.
Otherwise if files are not validated Zenaminer sends to the client an error message containing errors generated by the W3C validator.
Zenaminer gives the possibility to its users to enrich the content of a given content (e.g. a slide) by adding a textual comment to it. Such comments are named enrichments because they are meant to add more information to the content of a SCO, for example an enrichment to a slide could be a proof to a theorem, a correction to its content, an in-depth explanation to a concept, etc.. In order to avoid that content of an enrichment is buried in the database we added automatic annotation in order to enable machines to access to the content, enhancing search search and the possibility to display complementary information.
Figure 5 shows the actions performed by Zenaminer when a comment is received: 1. the client sends a POST request to /comment page, the message body contains the text of the comment; An example of enrichment is: President Obama called Wednesday on Congress to extend a tax break for students included in last year’s economic stimulus package, arguing that the policy provides more generous assistance. 2. the text is forwarded to the Spotlight client; 3. the Spotlight client sends a request to DBpedia Spotlight and obtains as response an automatically annotated version of the comment. As an additional parameter to the annotate request we could pass a minimum confidence and support values that will impact on precision and recall of the annotation itself; The request URI to annotate the enrichment in the previous example is: GET http://spotlight.dbpedia.org/rest/annotate? text=President%20Obama%20called%20Wednesday%20on%20Congress%20to %20extend%20a%20tax%20break%20for%20students%20included%20in%20last %20year%27s%20economic%20stimulus%20package,%20arguing%20that %20the%20policy%20provides%20more%20generous%20assistance. &confidence=0.4 &support=20 The response (in JSON format below) contains a reference to the annotated term in the enrichment (@ surfaceForm) and the DBpedia URI relative to the annotated content (@URI):
{ "@URI": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/United States Congress", "@support": "9321", "@types": "Organisation,Legislature", "@surfaceForm": "Congress", "@offset": "44", "@similarityScore": "0.14802740514278412", "@percentageOfSecondRank": "0.6257434730652487" } 4. finally, the enrichment and its annotations are stored into the database. A SCORM package includes a XML file named “manifest”, it describes a course and is used to list all lectures in it, all resources (files) associated to each lecture and some sequencing rules used to define how the user accesses to SCOs. Figure 6 shows in a tree structure how the manifest file is represented into the relational database. In addition, a SCORM package lists several SCOs, each SCO includes an HTML file containing slides, a CSS file to describe the style, a Javascript file to describe the behavior. Additional files can be included in a SCO: videos, subtitles or files describing synchronization between a video and the slides. Files linked into the manifest are then packaged together into a ZIP file. Currently Zenaminer does not support sequencing rules, thus management of such rules is up to the SCO designer. 6
The validation phase of the Web-service was conducted during the course “Multimedia Environments” (Academic Year 2010/2011) for the Master of Science in Cinema and Media Engineering at the Politecnico di Torino. Zenaminer was thought as a service in order to design e-learning projects (SCORM Packages) for the course “Multimedia Environments”. The objective for the students was to create a SCORM package defining both content and presentation. Students were divided in 20 teams, each team defined a personal learning environment building different interfaces (using the SoC concept). Students acted as SCO designers, the projects were the use case for Zenaminer and we verified the potentiality of the separation of content from presentation. The demo is available at http://eridano.polito.it:8080. Figure 7 and 8 show two different views of the same raw data done by two different groups of students. Such interfaces are able to show same contents in two different ways. The controller of each interface collects the list of SCORM packages stored into Zenaminer. Depending on the SCORM package selected by the user, the controller gathers the entire set of lectures for that package and displays the related Table of Contents (ToC). The user is, then, free to navigate the lectures (SCOs) following the ToC, when a lecture is selected the controller requests all files associated to that lecture and the view is updated accordingly. For example, in both figures the selected SCO had a set of slides and a video associated to it. Thanks to the sync file, the view is able to synchronize the video with the slides.
The Web Service was developed with the framework Pylons 1.07. The source code8 is released under the GNU GPLv3. In order to better balance and dis
tribute the load we decided to use Apache 2.2 HTTP Server9 as interface between the requests towards the Web Service. As relational database we used PostgresSQL 910; it stores data extracted from the SCORM by the web-service. Raw data stored in the database are available through REST calls and serialized into JSON format. The W3C Markup Validation Service is used to validate the HTML of the lectures that must be conform to W3C standards. Finally we used Spotlight to automatically annotate the enrichments of learners. 7
In this paper we proposed and argued a Web Service Architecture for e-learning.
Zenaminer goes beyond the limitations of the SCORM and allows a complete
separation of content and presentation. Content creators are free to define
learning environments without constraints of traditional LMSs. Zenaminer does not
limit the definition of the interfaces, the graphic design and the learner
interaction with a SCO. In the field of e-learning the presentation (the interface) does
not only involve the aesthetic appeal and the usability but also affects the
learning process. In fact the interface design [
10 http://www.postgresql.org/
The “Separation of Concerns” (SoC) allows SCO designers to improve elearning acceptance. For example a SCO designer could create different environments for the same course according to the learners’ computer literacy or could improve the interoperability of SCOs designing different interfaces for different devices (e.g. Smart Phones). Not secondary is the possibility to integrate and manage multimedia contents as separate entities from the learning content. In traditional LMSs a multimedia content must be integrated in a SCO while, in Zenaminer, content-types other than text (e.g. videos) can be managed and integrated regardless of SCOs. This feature does not compromise the SCORM compatibility with traditional LMSs.
Finally Zenaminer allows collaborative learning. Learners have an active role
in the definition of contents thanks the possibility to enrich lectures with personal
contributions. Content creators are free to define different models of
collaborative learning; they can implement a Wiki model or they can choose a model with
less collaboration. In addition to collaborative learning it is possible to integrate
contents thanks to instruments offered by the Semantic Web. The Automatic
annotation allows the integration between of content with hypertext link
navigation in order to satisfy more effectively the information needs of the learner.
Furthermore the SCO designer could decide to allow learners to disambiguate or
integrate automatic annotations. The use of ontology-based annotation pushes
Zenaminer to be a Linked Data LMS. The architecture proposed in this paper
allows Instructional designers to better implement learning theories (e.g.
Cognitivism, Constructivism) and teaching strategies. For example they could choose
to minimize the content of a course and focus on collaborative learning; this
approach satisfies the key aspect of Constructivism that considers fundamental the
collaboration between learners [
Thanks to all students of the course “Multimedia Environments” academic year 2010/2011 of the Politecnico di Torino. They were developers and analysts of our Web Service with a vibrant cooperation spirit, which was fundamental in achieving this important goal. A special thanks to SCO designers Jacopo Berta, Federica Tina Bossa (who developed the SCO view shown in Figure 7) and Lucia Marengo, Alice Ferrari (who developed the SCO view shown in Figure 8).