“Marsupial” is a set of protocols defined by the Ministry of Education of Catalonia in the context of the 1-to-1 program “educat1x1/eduCAT 2.0”.
The target of “Marsupial” is to facilitate the communication between Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and on-line commercial textbooks provided by publishers.
The “Marsupial” protocol defines three main functions:
- An internal structure of digital textbooks, usually as a tree of chapters or topics, thus facilitating direct references from the VLE to specific contents of the book.
- Management of credentials and authentication of students on textbook platforms, so after a single login into the VLE students can work with their digital textbooks (even from different publishers) without having to log-in again into each platform.
- Reporting to the VLE results of exercises and activities made by students in digital textbooks. This allows teachers to have the results of all exercises collected in a single place, thus facilitating a global assessment.
“Marsupial” is based on SCORM and SOAP, and operates in two formats:
- Remote SCORM (like a regular SCORM object, but with media content residing outside the VLE and subjected to authentication. Results of exercises are reported directly to the VLE from the user's browser)
- Remote content (similar to Remote SCORM, but using web services to report results of exercises between textbook platforms and the VLE)
“Marsupial” has three main components:
- The documents containing the open specification
- The implementation of a “Marsupial” client for Moodle
- A minimalistic implementation of a publisher platform called Marsupial Publisher Simulator (MPS). It implements all the server-side protocols and provides “example” books for testing.
The “Marsupial” implementations are open source licensed under GPL v2