SUNIWE Project Summary

SUNIWE was a JISC Distributed E-Learning Regional Pilot project which ran from April 2005 to March 2007. The project partners were drawn from three distinctive regional consortia: the Staffordshire University Regional Federation (SURF), the Wales e-Training Network (WeTN) and the Northern Ireland Integrated Managed Learning Environment (NIIMLE).

SUNIWE was designed to build on the work done by the NIIMLE Project in implementing a portal to provide access to personalised information for learners. The aim was to extend the NIIMLE portal, trial this within the two partner consortia, and to further develop the portal content to provide personalised links to VLEs, library systems and e-resources. A parallel project strand looked at implementing and piloting the Shibboleth federated authorisation software. Shibboleth would be used to secure the portal and its content and allow seamless access to the portal throughout each consortium.

The Rational Unified Process (RUP) was used as the project management and software development approach. It is a use case-driven, iterative software development process framework which focuses on identifying and mitigating risks and producing working software at each stage of development. It was important to use an iterative software development approach because it better suited the speculative nature of the development work. The portal was to be developed first within SURF and then the outputs cascaded and implemented within WeTN. This would allow the WeTN team to refine their requirements in light of the experience of the SURF developments. SURF and WeTN would then pilot the portal and evaluate it.

The RUP was followed to capture the requirements, analyse the data, design and implement the system. The system was built on the same foundations as NIIMLE. uPortal was used as the portal framework, uPortal channels were developed to display the personalised content in the portal and IMS Enterprise Web Services were developed to provide the data from institutional databases throughout each consortium. The scope of the project was reduced due to the lack of available data and insufficient interoperability with existing systems but the project successfully implemented channels and Web services to allow the portal to display personal, course and transcript information and link to VLEs and electronic resources.

The biggest risk in the project was the Shibboleth implementation. Shibboleth was investigated and experimented with throughout the project and the project team sought advice far and wide but Shibboleth proved to be inappropriate for use with the portal and Web services for several reasons. Loss of key personnel during the project slowed the development effort such that the conclusion about Shibboleth was reached too late in the project to allow an alternative to be developed, although a candidate solution was identified. The lack of a secure environment for the portal and Web services meant that the portal could not be piloted at SURF and WeTN.

Within the context of the aims of the distributed e-learning regional pilots, SUNIWE ultimately did not achieve its aim of piloting and evaluating the portal but key issues and barriers to facilitating progression, sharing of resources across institutions and supporting the independent lifelong learner were identified, especially in the area of federated identity management.

The JISC SURF WBLWay Project is building on the skills, knowledge and experience gained in SUNIWE to create a personalised portal to support people involved in work-based learning in Foundation Degrees in the Staffordshire University Regional Federation.