We are pleased to announce that four central repositories have now been open sourced as part of the “Control & Connect” project. This project incorporates functions from the open-source project CLM to facilitate its interoperability.
These four repositories form the foundation of the developed middleware, which enables schools and educational institutions to manage digital educational media in a legally secure and efficient manner. With these components, educational institutions can centrally organize licenses and control access to digital media according to legal requirements.
Here is an overview of the repositories:
- https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/cc_license-core: The core component for license management, providing all functions for managing licenses (including UI).
- https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/cc_license-manager: This module manages and assigns licenses to users or groups.
- https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/cc_metadata-manager: Manages the metadata of educational media to support the licensing process.
- https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/cc_user-context-manager: Manages user information and their permissions within the license management system.
Control & Connect: An Overview of the Project
Digital educational media play an increasingly important role in school education. However, their use is often hindered by technical obstacles such as media breaks and a multitude of registration procedures. The acquisition of licenses and the management of usage rights is often labor-intensive and requires significant manual effort, as various institutions are involved.
To address these challenges, the “Control & Connect” project was initiated. Its aim is to provide seamless and media-break-free access to digital educational media in line with the digitalization strategies of the federal and state governments. Teachers and learners should benefit from simplified handling.
The project is supported by a consortium of three main actors: Fraunhofer FOKUS, which is responsible for the technical implementation; the Association of Educational Media (Verband Bildungsmedien Service GmbH (VBMS)), which represents the interests of school associations and publishers; and the n-21 state initiative (Landesinitiative n-21 e. V), which contributes its extensive experience in managing and coordinating school structures in Lower Saxony. Together, they work to effectively address the existing challenges. Click here for more information!
Detailed Information on the Repositories
License Management Component
This component is designed to model usage rights for digital learning content and facilitates the exchange of data between the systems of educational providers and registration systems. This includes metadata systems for representing media, license marketplaces for acquiring and managing licenses, and registration systems for schools and their users. The data models used in Control & Connect inherit from the basic data models used in CLM. The Data Access Objects and Data Transfer Objects provided by CLM, which in addition to the defined data models provide an abstraction interface for executing database operations, also help to ensure the separation of data logic and application logic.
CC-METADATA-MANAGER
The CC-Metadata-Manager is a central product metadata component that collects and provides product metadata according to IMS Metadata (Learning Object Metadata, LOM, Version 1.2.1). It acts as a proxy server, allowing providers such as publishers to register. When the license management requests product metadata, this component forwards the requests to the appropriate endpoints. Additionally, a plugin allows for the translation of BiLo product metadata into the IMS Metadata format (LOM, Version 1.2.1).
CC-USER-CONTEXT-MANAGER
The CC-User-Context-Manager enables real-time querying of comprehensive context information about users via the Schulconnex standard, such as group memberships, roles, and organizational affiliations. This information is retrieved directly from the login server during the license assignment process. Licenses can thus be precisely allocated based on various organizational attributes. Currently, the authentication server supported for this process is moin.schule.
Conclusion
With these open-source components, the license management of “Control & Connect” provides a future-proof and legally secure solution for efficiently and user-friendly managing digital educational content. Schools and educational institutions can thereby organize access to digital learning media easily and in compliance with the law.