The goal of OKI is to define an architectural framework that facilitates the development and delivery of educational software applications. This architecture is being generally described by two service layers defined by implementation independent Application programming Interfaces (APIs). One, Common Services, provides hooks to institutional infrastructure and other fundamental services that provide a backbone for higher level services and applications. The second layer, Educational, will bundle functionality that is of particular usefulness to the developers of various kinds of educational software applications.By defining Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are not bound to any one implementation of a particular service, OKI intends to provide a boundary layer that buffers educational software from infrastructure that is localized or that might go through changes that would otherwise require major re-writes of code at an application level. The services themselves are also intended to be modular, bound together loosely through shared objects and interfaces.
The goal of all this is to facilitate development and sharing of educational software applications, which OKI commonly calls "Tools." Development is facilitated through providing a rich set of services allowing developers to concentrate on the real pedagogical aspects of design and not about basics like how to authenticate a user or where to store documents and metadata. Sharing is facilitated through the abstraction provided by APIs, allowing an application built at one institution, using a particular collection of infrastructure services, to be easily transported to another.
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