E-learning as a Web service (extended abstract)

E-learning has been a topic of increasing interest in recent years. It is often perceived as a group effort, where content authors, instructional designers, multimedia technicians, teachers, trainers, database administrators, and people from various other areas of expertise come together in order to serve a community of learners. In a typical e-learning scenario, many of the activities can be perceived and modeled as processes and consequently be executed as workflows; there are even prototypical system developments that are experimenting with this approach. On the other hand, there are increasingly many activities, which aim at providing services of any kind on the Web; these can occur as business-to-business or as business-to-consumer services and are generally subsumed under the term Web services. In this paper we suggest to combine the areas of e-learning and Web services, by providing electronic learning offerings as (individual or collections of) Web services as well. We elaborate on this by showing how content providers and content consumers (i.e., learners) can communicate appropriately through a Web service platform with its common description, publication, and retrieval functionalities. Finally, we indicate how a corresponding system can be realized.