A Framework for Helping Developers in the Integration of External Tools into Virtual Learning Environments

In this paper we present a lightweight abstract framework to help developers to integrate tools into a learning environment. This approach is based on an abstract declarative layer and an integration library. The proposal follows the cloud computing paradigm, defining and storing the different integration models remotely. Finally, the proposed integration framework has been successfully used for integrating a tool called JBraindead into a real educational web environment. This integration showed how developers reduced the coding time, due to the fact that they did not have to deal with e-Learning standards and techniques and could focus on coding the own tool.