An interoperability framework of open educational resources and massive open online courses for sustainable e-learning platform

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have been invented to support Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for higher education. While numerous learning courses and contents were authored, most of the existing resources are now hard to reuse/redistribute among instructors due to the privacy of the contents. Therefore, Open Educational Resources (OER) and the Creative Commons license (CC) are interesting solutions available to alleviate such problems of MOOC. This research presents a new framework that effectively connects OER and MOOC for a life-long e- Learning platform for Thai people. We utilize the Fedora Commons repository for an OER back-end, and develop a new front-end to manage OER resources. In addition, we introduce a "FedX API" - including a packet encapsulation and a data transmission module - that organizes educational resources between both systems. We also proposed the CC declaring function to help participants on-the-fly declare their content license; therefore, any resources must be granted as an open licensing. Another important function is a Central Authorized System (CAS) which is applied to develop single signing-on to facilitate the OER-MOOC connection. Since the framework is designed to support the massive demand, the concurrent access capability is also evaluated to measure the performance of the proposed framework. The results show that the proposed framework can provide up to 750 concurrencies without any defects. The FedX API does not produce bottleneck trouble on the interoperability framework in any cases. In addition, resources can be exchanged among the third-party OER repositories by an OAI-PMH harvesting tool.