Marius Politze

From a SharePoint-Based E-Learning System to Moodle

A Moodle-based e-learning system will replace RWTH Aachen Universitys SharePoint-based e-learning system, which was introduced 10 years ago, within the course of digitizing teaching processes. The strategic background for the university management is that in the competition for students, teaching must become more attractive through innovative formats. At the same time, students demand the support of new, state of the art teaching scenarios and formats. In contrast to the old SharePoint-based LMS solution, there is a large Moodle community at German universities that actively promotes developing Moodle further according to university-specific requirements. Through the collaborative development of Moodle within the community, interests can be pooled, meaning individual efforts can be reduced and a sustainable and quality-assured development of the LMS can be guaranteed. Within the context of introducing a new e-learning platform, not only technical challenges arose but numerous organizational and procedural changes surfaced as well. Additionally, the stakeholders wanted to keep the operation and functionalities close to the old system in order to make the transition for users as simple as possible, while at the same time, developing a modern platform with up-to-date user guidance and innovative teaching formats.

e-Assessment Behind the Scenes - Common Perception of e-Assessment and How We See It Nowadays

There exist common preconceptions about e-Assessment that, in the view of many, prohibit e-Assessment to come into operation. In this paper we examine the most commonly found preconceptions and derive how eAssessment should be implemented from our point of view to overcome these obstacles, considering programming assessment as an example. While deriving an e-Assessment scenario, we concentrate on the integration of e-Assessment into the process workflow of institute of higher education, software for e-Assessment and suitable operational scenarios for e-Assessment.

Migration of a web service back-end from a relational to a document-oriented database

In the current infrastructure, the database server poses a single point of failure. An off site backup protects from data loss but allows neither automatic fail-over nor scaling. Like many modern real time web applications, this scenario requires scalable application and database software architectures. Our goal therefore is to migrate the application to a more scalable topology that uses replication in order to distribute data store and access to all available nodes.

From eLearning to eScience: Building a Service Oriented Architecture to Support Research

By supporting a wide range of eLearning scenarios with an integrated software suite and API, RWTH Aachen University was able to achieve a high standardization, high rate of adoption of technology and seamless integration into various learning processes by teachers and students in the past years. As students emerge to researchers, they are often missing this kind of integrated support. To close this gap the experiences gained from setting up an eLearning infrastructure are being used to design and implement a service-oriented architecture to support a wide range of eScience scenarios.

Extending the OAuth2 Workflow to Audit Data Usage for Users and Service Providers in a Cooperative Scenario

The increasing amount and heterogeneity of devices demands changes in IT infrastructure. Many web service architectures used to meet these demands use the OAuth2 workflow to secure their interfaces. These implementations usually tightly couple web services and an OAuth2 authorization service. The presented extension to the OAuth2 workflow is capable handling authorizations for multiple attached services and therefore combines existing services of a central IT service provider but also allows other services running in a cooperative model with only a single instance of the authorization server. Based on auditing parameters it is possible to present access per resource or per method giving service providers and application developers more insight in how their services are used and show users by whom their personal data is used.

Prediction of learning space occupation through WLAN access point data using Kalman filter and gradient boosting regression

Learning spaces at universities are limited in their capacity, while, providing more such places to students, often imposes quite some problems to the responsible institutions. This leads to problems for the students finding adequate space to conduct their studies on the campus. The consequences are, e.g. large queues of students waiting in front of buildings in the morning, especially during the examination periods, with not many students being able to find a location of their preference. In the course of a day, students change their locations, again searching for new places to sit and learn. In this paper, we present a ML technique that, making use of WLAN access point data in an operational environment of University premises, predicts learning space usage, making use of historical data, and presents them to the student, so they make proper choices. The system has been evaluated on real data and the results are promising for being used in real application environments.