IMS Enterprise Issues

A conflict between award to module relationships and the IMS Enterprise Group Management Service operations was identified. At Staffordshire University, learners have a choice of which modules to take to work towards an award. Consequently, there is no static relationship defined between awards and modules. Each module could be a part of several awards. It is only within the context of an individual learner that the relationships exist. In other words, for an individual learner, an award will be composed of a collection of modules, but for another learner, the collection of modules composing the same award might be completely different.

The IMS Group Management Service readGroups operation can be called with a collection of group IDs only. The learner cannot be specified which meant that, for the Staffordshire University implementation of the operation, group relationships could not be returned with the rest of the group data. To allow the relationship between awards and modules to be retrieved, the development team added an extension to role data returned by the readMembershipsForPerson operation. Because readMembershipsForPerson is called with the learner ID the relationships between the awards and modules for that learner could be retrieved from the database.