FEDERATING SCHOOL WEBSITES: DEVELOPING A FEDERATION PLATFORM FOR MULTIPLE WEBSITES WITH COMMONALITIES

Websites are now proliferating as most popular communication channels. In these days of smart working and learning, as students and parents demands the convenience of the access through Internet for communicating with schools and teachers, every school across different levels and grades build and maintain class websites. Most schools are experiencing problems in building and maintaining these websites as time and efforts need to be concerted beyond their expertise. However, schools in a same district share common curriculum in a lock-step manner under the supervision of city-wide school boards, local governments or district headmasters. It seems that every school in the district request funding to build similar websites for similar purpose, though the sites may be different from each other only a bit in terms of structure and content. As school (and class) websites for the same grade have similar requirements with a bit of twist, these websites can be technically 'federated.' Though several authoring tools were developed and used in practice, most were designed for authoring and maintaining a single website. This study presents an architectural framework for a management platform developed for federating school websites. It is designed with provisions of templates and module library, and has been tested in the field. Detail requirements are analyzed and presented. System architecture under development is presented with details of loosely coupled modular structure of the platform.