Abstract:

Different tools for interactive learning proved to have a lot of advantages for educators as they aims to create a more vibrant relationship between teachers and learners, to increase the activity during the learning process, and to provoke teacher-student collaboration. Moreover, studies prove that most of the learners may experience deeper learning as a result of the discussions that follow interactive questions. However, recent results of our own survey has shown that there are still a lot of obstacles which obstruct widespread adoption of interactive learning in everyday learning process. Teachers face a number of certain difficulties when they trying to apply and reuse software artifacts created for interactive learning tools (ILT). Examples for such ILT are most common mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, and tablets), interactive whiteboards, desktop workstations, consoles, specific software platforms. It exists a need for a common software solution that will facilitate teachers in application of ILT and interactive methods in their everyday work.

This paper presents the design of such solution that follows the principles of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). SOA is based on the concept of applying the method for composition of primitive building blocks to implement large business processes or create complex solutions for various range of application areas. This way solutions, based on SOA principles are characterized with high flexibility, maintainability and interoperability as different building block are easy to change and reuse.

The solution is expected to provide users (both learners and educators) with a number of features like:
(1) easy to use interface that allows work with minimal technical knowledge;
(2) localization and
(3) repository that contains a number of reusable artifacts, templates and best practices that support learning.

For this purpose a study has been conducted to analyze the most popular ILT and the corresponding software for them. Architecture is designed, based on the identified ILTs and their specific characteristics together with the requirements extracted from a survey that we recently conducted among educators.

Keywords:

Interactive learning, Interactive learning tools, Service-Oriented Architectures.