Creating e-learning web services towards reusability of functionalities in creating e-learning systems

Many educational and training institutions acquired proprietary e-Learning systems which are tailored-made and difficult to reuse in the development process of new systems. This paper aims to look into the issue of reusability of the functionalities in the e-Learning domain. The functionalities that span across many e-Learning systems (common functionalities) can be built as reusable components by using Web services and the implementation of these services enables the reuse of the functionalities . A pool of e-Learning Web services is built and allows to provide functionalities to the various e-learning systems. These e-learning Web services are described by using an ontology which takes into account the functionalities' characteristics of elearning platforms. The aim is to allow developers to find them automatically. Following that, instead of building from scratch, the development of future e-Learning systems will involve assembling the suitable functionalities from Web services' set related to e-Learning. This will tremendously reduce the time, effort and cost needed in building new e-Learning systems.