A Middleware for Educational Ecosystems - Rights and Access-Control Management by Design

This paper introduces a novel middleware framework designed to enhance interoperability and manage access rights within diverse educational ecosystems. Our approach leverages a hierarchically structured role and authorization management system to facilitate seamless integration across various educational platforms and content providers. By focusing on the central administration of authorizations, the framework ensures coherent educational journeys for users, enabling user-specific enrollments in educational programs, sovereign data management, and flexible adaptation to dynamic educational needs. We discuss the conceptual underpinnings of our system, including rights-as-a-graph and contextual hierarchy-based rights, and detail its practical applications through case studies. These include facilitating distributive education programs, ensuring data sovereignty for learning analytics, and supporting self-sovereign access model configurations. Our system addresses the critical need for a flexible, context-dependent rights management solution that can adapt to the evolving landscape of educational technologies and standards. Through a detailed examination of related works and by providing practical application scenarios, this paper contributes to the field of educational technology by offering a scalable, interoperable solution designed to support lifelong learning in an ever-changing world.