Abstract:

Nowadays, one of the challenges of presential or distance teaching it’s the integration between academic administration, with, for example, students’ information, courses, teachers, grades and documentation, and the world of new learning platforms, like Moodle and Blackboard.
Usual tasks, such as: student’s enrollments; evaluate the delivered documentation; and enroll students into the learning platform are manual processes generally, forcing these institutions to look for automated solutions. An example of tool that allows the integration of some procedures is the SugarCRM.

This article aims to present the modeling and development process of Sistema de Administração Acadêmica (SIAAM), that works with open or postgraduate courses, and involves the integration with the courses sales portal and the learning platform, based on the platforms Magento and Moodle.

SIAAM is responsible for: getting the created courses on the sales portal; depending on the course type (e.g., tutored), creating classes on Moodle automatically; managing courses associated classes, created on SIAAM, and that must have the enrollments on Moodle; getting students that effected a course purchase and must be part of SIAAM; automatically getting postgraduate courses grades published on the learning platform; managing questions concerned to payment or lack of payment of the course installments by the student and the need of the access block/unblock, simultaneously, on SIAAM and the learning platform; dealing with the course cancellation, in a seven days period, under Brazilian law of Consumer Protection Code, and the need to remove the student from the enrolled class/course, etc. In carrying out these activities, the SIAAM needs to communicate with the sales system and the learning platform. The solution used to this integration was the implementation of Web Services.

The communication between SIAAM and Magento uses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Web Services. In the case of the integration between SIAAM and Moodle, it was identified that the SOAP protocol has a little slow performance. Then, we used Representational State Transfer (REST) Web Services, what provided a better running.

Also, in the communication between SIAAM and Moodle, was used the "Ok Tech" Web Services plugin, which allows the administrator to expose Moodle functions to integration with administrative systems. The defined functions are available via XML-RPC, AMF, REST and SOAP.

The implementation of some SIAAM functions used third-party libraries, like: Quartz, to the functions that demand the task scheduling for future or periodic execution; Apache Commons Email, to automate the emails sending; and Jasper Reports, to generate PDF and XML reports.

The SIAAM was developed using the Technologies: JSP, to generate the web pages; Netbeans 8.0 IDE, to the system development; Apache Tomcat 8.0.3.0 with Java JDK 1.7, as web server; and MySQL 5.6 as database.

The SIAAM and its integration with the sales portal and learning platform are, currently, in tests and validation phase.

Keywords:

Academic administration, systems integration, learning platform, courses sales portal, SIAAM, Moodle, Magento.