Architectural Principles

1. The architecture should work for all of the three LMS systems (Moodle, Ultranet, and KnowledgeNet) involved in the MLE programme as a reasonable test that it will generalise to a wide range of current and future LMS systems used in New Zealand schools.
2. The architecture should work for a range of school contexts and levels (Primary through to Senior High School).
3. The architecture should use open standards and protocols for the transport layer (e.g. HTTP, XML, LEAP2A)
4. The architecture should be consistent with the Common Services Framework (Piers Harding, 2009)
5. Systems should be loosely coupled.
6. LEAP2A should be used as the preferred document encoding for portfolio content transfer
7. The architecture should be a lightweight web services approach. A RESTful approach is recommended over RPC due to its relative simplicity and transparency for service consumers
8. The architecture should use a delegated authentication and authorisation framework for secure transfer of content over HTTP or HTTPS. OAuth is recommended.
9. Attention should be paid to the structure of URIs used for content items such that they are consistent, predictable and meaningful. CURIES should be used.
10. Students should have a unique identifier outside of any particular institution. The NSN is an natural candidate.