CONTRIBUTIONS FOR THE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF MOBILE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Even providing several benefits and facilities with regard to teaching and learning, mobile learning environments present problems and challenges that must be investigated, especially with respect to the definition and standardization of architectural aspects. Most of these environments are still built in isolation, with particular structures and architectures, hindering aspects such as reuse and interoperability, for instance. On the other hand, several initiatives of using service orientation aspects to support and help the architectural definition of software systems have been investigated. In this paper we discuss the proposition of an architecture for service-oriented mobile learning environments. The architectural requirements that guided the establishment of the proposed architecture were defined by means of a systematic process, being prioritized and complemented with the help of domain specialists. In order to evaluate the proposed architecture, a prototype of a service-oriented mobile learning environment was implemented, showing the viability of practical application of such architecture, especially with regard to service consumption and service implementation, providing interoperability and reuse for educational services.