Combining Generic Programming and Service-Oriented Architectures for the Effective and Timely Development of Complex e-Learning Systems

Over the last years, e-Learning needs have been evolving accordingly with more and more demanding pedagogical and technological requirements. On-line learning environments no longer depend on homogeneous groups, static content and resources, and single pedagogies, but high customization and flexibility are a must in this context. As a result, current educational organizations’ needs involve extending and moving to highly customized learning and teaching forms in timely fashion, each incorporating its own pedagogical approach, each targeting a specific learning goal, and each incorporating its specific resources. Moreover, organizations’ demands include a cost-effective integration of legacy and separated learning systems, from different institutions, departments and courses, which are implemented in different languages, supported by heterogeneous platforms and distributed everywhere, to name some of them. Therefore, e-Learning applications need to be developed in a way that  overcome these demanding requirements as well as provide educational organizations with fast,  flexible and effective solutions for the enhancement and improvement of the learning performance and outcomes. To this end, in this paper, an innovative engineering software technique is introduced that combines the Generic Programming paradigm and Service-Oriented Architectures in the form of Web-services for the effective and timely construction of flexible, scalable, interoperable and robust applications as key aspects to address the current demanding and changing requirements in software development in general and specifically in the e-Learning domain. This results in a generic, reusable, extensible platform called Collaborative Learning Purpose Library for the systematic development of collaborative learning applications that help meet these demanding  requirements.