New WSO2 White Paper Presents a Reference Architecture for Enabling a Connected Education Ecosystem

Paper outlines an architecture for educational institutions that facilitates access and ensures security while fostering collaboration and creativity

Mountain View, CA – June 30, 2016 – Increasingly, educational institutions are going beyond the use of technology to ensure efficiency and speed, and they are moving toward the concept of a connected education ecosystem that enables students, educators and researchers to easily access and share information. To support their efforts, WSO2 has published a white paper on implementing an architecture for educational institutions that facilitates access and ensures security while fostering collaboration and creativity.

Connecting the Education Industry

The white paper, “Connected Education Reference Architecture,” was written by WSO2 Senior Technical Lead Eranga Perera. He begins by discussing the need for implementing a connected education ecosystem that supports high user turnover, frequent provisioning, diverse roles, and the growing use of online mobile and web apps.

Next, Eranga reviews the key challenges faced in building a connected education ecosystem, including the need to:

  • Address high edge costs for classroom items, such as digital white boards.
  • More effectively digitize content, exams, quizzes, lessons and plans.
  • Increase access to fast broadband connections.
  • Implement a digital education strategy focused on innovation, not money.
  • Improve access to information that supports global sharing and collaboration.
  • Incrementally implement aspects of a digital transformation to gain acceptance of the migration from conventional educational methods.

Eranga also explores key architectural requirements, such as providing access to resources and enabling them to be managed in a collaborative manner across disparate systems, devices and stakeholders. Additionally, he looks at the components of a connected education reference architecture, including a data bus, messaging, security gateway, API gateway, device management, and analytics, among others.

Eranga concludes with two customer use cases from institutions of higher education that demonstrate how WSO2’s 100% open source middleware was used to create end-to-end connected education solutions.

The white paper can be downloaded at https://wso2.com/whitepapers/connected-education-reference-architecture.

About the Author

Eranga Perera is a senior technical lead in the solution architecture team at WSO2. In this role, he works with customers to identify enterprise architecture solutions mainly related to integration, security and analytics. Prior to joining WSO2, Eranga worked at Kingslake Engineering Systems as a software architect where he performed research and development work and was instrumental in introducing new tools and platforms to the organization. He also was responsible for carrying design activities and producing architectural documents. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.

About WSO2

WSO2 empowers enterprises to build connected businesses and accelerate their pace of innovation with the industry’s only lean, fully integrated, and 100% open source enterprise middleware platform. Using WSO2’s platform, enterprises have all the functionality to build, integrate, manage, secure and analyze their APIs, applications, Web services, and microservices—on-premises, in the cloud, on mobile devices, and across the Internet of Things. Leading enterprise customers worldwide rely on WSO2’s platform and its robust performance and governance for their mission-critical applications. Today, these businesses represent nearly every sector: health, financial, retail, logistics, manufacturing, travel, technology, telecom and more. Visit https://wso2.com to learn more, or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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