Service based framework for knowledge portals

Abstract

This paper describes our work on establishing an on-line learning community to facilitate the interactions of the student (teams) in their group projects. It is illustrated with a Portal in the capstone project of our Bachelor of Software Engineering (BSE) course. [2] reported on our Monash University Software Engineering (MUSE) Studio Lab and the innovative software engineering capstone project experience. Our student teams used to store the various artefacts, which were produced as part of the SE Studio (capstone) projects on the servers in the studio lab. However, these SE product and process artefacts were not accessible uniformly through a web browser in a MUSE Portal. The Portal environment is aimed at providing a virtual learning space, knowledge aggregation and user management. In this paper, we provide details of our pedagogical service based framework, which has been designed and built to provide features to Portal users. The framework supports services such as group/team collaboration, task tracking, and project planning.The collaboration and learning services available from our Knowledge Portal is based on the learning activities as defined by [1] Nonaka1994. Nonaka defines: socializing to exchange views and develop trust between team members, dialoguing to share mental models and develop common vocabulary, systemising to combine knowledge by visualising interactions and constructing artifacts and exercising to communicate and reflect on outcomes. We follow a similar approach to enable team members to discuss and reflect on group findings with respect to SE processes & products during the year long SE Studio project, and reflect over individual thesis components.A pedagogical service based framework can service the current pedagogical needs of the SE group projects, other related subjects, and SE Honours research projects and is also extendible with more services on a demand basis. The focus has been on allowing custom subject specific services to be created without having the inherent overheads.A pedagogical framework with service based architecture has been built to provide services to the Portal users. The Portal Environment is the front-end through which services are exposed. Examples of services are: task tracking and project planning in group projects; collaboration between team members in a group project in a subject unit; knowledge repository of product/project assets; calendar facility etc. Support infrastructure services of user authentication, role and service allocation etc. are also managed via the portal environment.We show how on-line learning communities can be supported using the MUSE knowledge portal. The framework supports services such as team collaboration, task tracking, and project planning. The url for MUSE Portal is http://museportal.csse.monash.edu.au:8080/MUSEPortalWeb/.