Adaptive QoS for collaborative service-oriented learning environments

A learning environment consists of a dynamic mix of many different types of resources and facilities which should be aware of, and adapt to, the learner in his/her current context. This multiplicity of technologies and situations demands a service-oriented approach, and this in turn leads us to OGSA, which is the major emergent de facto standard for open, service-oriented information and communication technology based learning opportunities. Collaboration and contextualisation are important pedagogical goals, and must therefore be supported through services which can be created and modified dynamically to suit the current needs and situations of learners. Ubiquity and accessibility, sometimes referred to as "anytime, anywhere", are also important goals of technology enhanced learning, so we must be able to create services which can adapt to the capabilities of the infrastructure as it is made manifest for each learner in a collaborative community. In other words, a learning environment must be quality of service (QoS) aware, and, ideally, be able to adapt to that aspect of the context (the infrastructure) for each participant. This paper focuses on providing adaptive QoS for synchronous, real time conferencing for dynamically constituted learning groups. Firstly, pedagogical goals are reviewed, secondly, an example existing collaborative learning environment is described, with some discussion as to how it can be reengineered to be OGSA compliant We then describe work carried out to support adaptive QoS for synchronous conferencing and finally report on initial experiences. This paper contributes towards understanding how to support adaptive QoS for service-oriented learning environments, with a particular view to the emerging likelihood that such systems will be Grid-based.