Towards a service-oriented architecture for giving feedback in informal learning environments

Abstract

Feedback has is a part of continuous interaction between learners and their learning environment. It cannot be simplified to self-assessment and rewarding; it also adds tension that motivates the learners on their engagement on learning processes from the very beginning. Feedback relies on the learners’ previous actions as well as on the interaction context in which an action occurs. In this paper we propose service components and a service orchestration for a service oriented architecture (SOA) that are aligned to the process of providing feedback by adopting architectural concepts of context-aware applications. Using services instead of fully embedded layers, allows easier integration of components into existing systems at different levels. We describe a method how this is achieved for web-based systems by using state-of-the-art and standardised technology.