Web-Based Service for Collaborative Authoring Learning Using Grid Portal

1. Introduction

There are numerous vital matters surrounding quality, costs and access of knowledge and information over the Internet with the requirement of learning material and content. There is an urgent necessitate to simplify these issues with special concentrate on Open Educational Resources (OER) ideas, as it becomes clearer that the development of Internet offers genuine chances for improving knowledge transfer, access as well as information from colleges and universities to a broad range of users. Individual work is vital in any learning course, however, students should also learn the collaborative behaviour. Students’ contributions are required in group efforts. Group works in designing and authoring a courseware is not an easy task. The key problem in a work group is imbalanced distribution of task and performance evaluation. In order to conquer this difficulty, it is essential to offer the online collaborative tools and collaborative authoring environment.

The conventional web based education (WBE) based on one server is not a suitable idea for the collaborative tools and online collaborative authoring environment because of slow operation in searching, uploading, visualizing output and numerical computational. The idea is how to improve access and usefulness for the users of such Open Educational Resources (OER). Therefore, the design and authoring activities in online group works require efficient and powerful web server in parallel computing platform, which will support online collaborative efforts of students. The new WBE offers an efficient authoring infrastructure dealing with online collaborative tools and collaborative authoring environment based on grid portal technology to solve the unequal distribution of task and compensation problem as well as investigates how to improve access and usefulness for the users of such OER. The WBE supported with the Grid portal technology as well as high performance computing platform results in very high speed up in terms of searching, supporting huge memory, high quality of visualization and increasing the computational performance.

This paper is structured in five sections: This section comprises a brief description of open educational resources and graphics, animation, audio and video technology course. The second section of this paper is devoted to a brief review of web assisted collaborative authoring learning. In section three, Grid portal technology, web services technology and service oriented architecture are summarized. Furthermore, the paradigm and performance of web service are briefly discussed in section four. Section five concludes this paper.