A Research Study to Gather the Functional Requirements for a SOA Middleware Application to Bridge the LMS to LOR Data Movement Interoperability Gap for Education

Abstract

This study gathered functional requirements for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Middleware Application that can resolve the data movement interoperability gap that exists between learning management systems (LMS) and learning object repositories (LOR). A panel of Computer Information Systems (CIS) experts participated in a five-stage, web-based, anonymous Delphi process to establish a valid set of criteria for the proposed middleware application. In the process, the panel approved and ranked 28 functional requirements for the proposed application. The functional requirements gathered from this study are being used to build an application prototype using SOA Web Services to move learning object data across the Internet from a LMS to a LOR.