Consultant's Report: Hybrid Systems for Delivery of Online Learning Services: An Architectural Perspective

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted the education sector worldwide. There is a need to build a hybrid system that facilitates learning services through multiple networks. As the characteristics and availability of these networks vary with country, a universal design for a hybrid system will not work. Thus, designing a hybrid system demands a systematic approach that can work across communication networks to harness their capabilities and meet the expectations. This report highlights the importance of quality aspects of a learning system in the design process. To help the architects, the report presents five new quality attributes – pervasiveness, affordability, learning availability, educator capacity, and learnability - and tools to ensure these qualities in the system. The report also presents a reference architecture to build hybrid learning systems.