TOWARDS AN E-LEARNING ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE AND FRAMEWORK

While many application level standards have been proposed by a variety of standards bodies within the e-Learning community, there is a lack of enterprise standards for technology-enhanced learning (TEL) service providers. The primary purpose of this paper is to describe the need of a similar architecture and enterprise framework and guidelines for the TEL industry with reference to other domains like IT and Telecom. In specific, after reviewing existing efforts in this direction, a unified framework similar to existing mature standards like TM Forum's Frameworx is proposed. This unified framework includes an Enterprise Architecture, a Business Process Framework, an Information Framework, and an Application Framework for a TEL eco-system. Enterprise Architecture follows TOGAF guidelines to provide a high level association of key business processes with IT Systems and the underlying infrastructure. In short, this paper is an effort towards providing a reference model, and an everyday working guide to business analysts, architects and system analysts working for TEL software vendors, Software as a Service (SaaS) providers and potential customers which may include Universities/Institutes, Schools, technical and vocational training institutes.