CampusConnect: An open-source initiative to connect Learning Management Systems

CampusConnect is an initiative of twelve universities in the Southwest of Germany to connect their Learning Management Systems (LMS) to support their cooperative degree programmes and courses. The technical infrastructure of CampusConnect allows the possibility to publish course information across the LMSs of different universities (hence showing the students which courses are supported by electronic learning resources at other universities). It leads the students to these courses (simply by links), and gives them access to these courses by offering a token-based authentication. These issues, without CampusConnect time-consuming for students and IT staff alike, are handled with an MOM (Message Oriented Middleware) based architecture with the “E-LearningCommunity-Server” (ECS) as middleware between the LMSs of the involved universities. The ECS is responsible for the information and message routing between the systems. As a technological requirement, the LMSs (and other systems as well) get their own connectors that support the web service interface of the ECS. In use since 2008 with the LMS ILIAS, the architecture has recently been extended to support the LMSs Moodle and Stud.IP and to connect Campus Management Systems. The article describes the supported scenarios, the design, and the design principles of the architecture of CampusConnect.