Final Report on the Role and Operation of an ICT E-Infrastructure and E-Learning Office for Applications to Use DANUBIUS-RI

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Final Report on the Role and Operation of an ICT E-Infrastructure and E-Learning Office for Applications to Use DANUBIUS-RI Final Report on the role and operation of an ICT e-infrastructure and e-Learning Office for applications to use DANUBIUS-RI Deliverable 5.18 DANUBIUS-PP Deliverable 5.18 Preparatory Phase for the pan-European Research Infrastructure DANUBIUS–RI “The Project Full title International Centre for advanced studies on river- sea systems” Project Acronym DANUBIUS-PP Grant Agreement No. 739562 Coordinator Dr. Adrian Stanica Project start date and duration 1st December 2016, 36 months Project website www.DANUBIUS-pp.eu Deliverable Nr. 5.18 Deliverable Date M24 Work Package No. 5 Work Package Title Architecture Responsible UPC & POS SPAIN UPC Vicente Gracia, Agustin Sánchez-Arcilla, César Mösso Authors & Institutes Acronyms POS Manuel Alberto Moreno, Antonio Torralba Final (F) Status: Draft (D) Revised draft (RV) 2 DANUBIUS-PP Deliverable 5.18 Public (PU) Restricted to other program participants (PP) Restricted to a Dissemination level: group specified by the consortium (RE) Confidential, only for members of the consortium (CO) 3 DANUBIUS-PP Deliverable 5.18 Table of contents Executive summary / abstract ......................................................................................................... 6 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 8 2. The DANUBIUS-RI context ...................................................................................................... 9 2.1. The General structure of DANUBIUS-RI ........................................................................... 9 2.2. Resources and components to be integrated in DANUBIUS-RI ...................................... 14 3. e-services in DANUBIUS-RI ................................................................................................... 15 3.1. Common e-services demanded by Research Infrastructures .......................................... 15 3.2. The potential e-services offer of DANUBIUS-RI .............................................................. 15 3.3. Training offer in DANUBUIS-RI ....................................................................................... 18 4. E-learning as a distinctive service in DANUBIUS-RI .............................................................. 19 4.1. The Learning Management System (LMS) ...................................................................... 20 4.2. The Moodle initiative ....................................................................................................... 24 4.3. The OpenCourseWare initiative ...................................................................................... 25 5. ICT for Virtual e-Learning Environments ................................................................................ 28 6. Building DANUBIUS-RI infrastructure .................................................................................... 31 7. Summary and conclusions ..................................................................................................... 38 References ................................................................................................................................... 40 ANNEX I LIST OF TRAINING COURSES TO BE OFFERED IN DANUBIUS-RI (from WP4) ........ 42 ANNEX II LIST OF FUNCTIONALITIES OF A LMS (SCOPEO, 2009) .......................................... 45 List of figures Figure 1. DANUBIUS-RI landscape ................................................................................................ 9 Figure 2: Distribution of training offer by the elements of DANUBIUS-RI ....................................... 18 Figure 3: Screen capture of a course using Moodle ...................................................................... 24 Figure 4: Screen capture of the Civil Engineering degree at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Spain) ................................................................................................................................. 26 Figure 5: Example of Client-Server based Virtual Environment ..................................................... 28 Figure 6: Virtual Learning Environment schema based on ICT e-infrastructure ............................. 29 Figure 7. From data to impact ....................................................................................................... 31 Figure 8: Data flow between DANUBIUS RI elements................................................................... 31 4 DANUBIUS-PP Deliverable 5.18 Figure 9: Basic DANUBIUS RI Architecture .................................................................................. 32 Figure 10: Advance DANUBIUS RI Architecture ........................................................................... 33 Figure 11: Typology of web servers .............................................................................................. 34 Figure 12: LAMP toolchain ............................................................................................................ 37 List of Tables Table 1: Summary of existing e-services for RI ............................................................................. 15 Table 2. DANUBIUS-RI potential e-services. Direct refers to a service directly related with the exploitation of the subject to which it refers. Internal refers to services to handle with the associated management aspects .................................................................................................................... 17 Table 3. Technologies associated to LMS tools according to Boneu (2007). ................................. 21 Table 4. LMS open source software applications. ......................................................................... 22 5 DANUBIUS-PP Deliverable 5.18 Executive summary / abstract DANUBIUS-PP is a three-year project to raise DANUBIUS-RI (International Centre for Advanced Studies on River-Sea Systems) to the legal, financial and technical maturity required for successful implementation and development. DANUBIUS-RI is a pan-European distributed research infrastructure (RI) building on existing expertise to support interdisciplinary research on river-sea (RS) systems, spanning the environmental, social and economic sciences. It will provide access to a range of RS systems, facilities and expertise, a ‘one-stop store’ for knowledge exchange, access to harmonised data, and a platform for interdisciplinary research, education and training. Research infrastructures like DANUBIUS-RI offer services that facilitate the coordination of activities in their communities of practice, promote collaboration, build capacity through e-learning, and benefit from centralisation/operation at scale. Key elements of this preparatory phase are to determine the necessary computing, storage and communication infrastructure and simulation tools for the distributed RI and to provide the tools and techniques for the development of all computing elements. This study is concerned with creating and integrating an ICT distributed e-Infrastructure to support the Virtual Research Environments, develop a virtual environment for cooperation, research, and e- Learning activities, and decision makers within the RI. An e-Services provider for DANUBIUS-RI will be created. The study will design the ICT e-infrastructure to provide applications with coordinated access to the different and distributed parts of the RI The present document explores the approach to be used for the definition of the ICT e-infrastructure and e-learning office for applications to use DANUBIUS-RI. Data e-services and Training e-services have been identified as fundamental issues within DANUBIUS-RI. Moodle has been identified as an excellent learning management system. E-learning and e-learning technology is gradually gaining global acceptance by Information Communication Technology (ICT) experts, education managers, institutions, corporate bodies, students and other stake holders in education industry. It has been proved the adding value of ICT e-Infrastructures on information sharing among researchers and by allowing them to be connected independently of where they are in any time. Current adopted and/or open source standards must be the way to proceed for sharing information and also let new researchers or datasets/database to be connected with DANUBIUS_RI ICT e- infrastructure, trying to avoid the use of private solutions. Standards solutions are fully supported by 6 DANUBIUS-PP Deliverable 5.18 the research community and will evolve according to the new requirements and constrains that come up during the proper development of the communication technologies. 7 DANUBIUS-PP Deliverable 5.18 1. Introduction The DANUBIUS-RI architecture, which will be the units and how they will be organised is defined in WP5. This main objective can be split in two targets: (i) the definition of the roles and contributions of the Hub, the Supersites, the Data Centre and the Technology Transfer Office and (ii) the definition of the internal functioning and links between them. This document deals with the design of an ICT distributed e-Infrastructure to support the Virtual Research Environments and e-learning activities within DANUBIUS-RI. It also has to design the ICT e-infrastructure to provide applications with coordinated access to the different and distributed parts of the RI. The present deliverable has integrated the latest achievements of other WPs but specially the findings of the tasks of WP4 (Developing the funding model of
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