A two-tier on-line learning model for teaching Web services

Since the advent of the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW), the computing model known as business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has evolved to take advantage of the ubiquitous accessing of the Internet The concept of Web services using extensible Markup Language (XML) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) has become an essential subject in the curriculum of Computer Science. However, there have been too many standards to be covered in one semester. This paper discusses the pedagogical issues on teaching Web services using a two-tiered approach. This approach is deployed with a Web-based online tutorial to form the main idea of the two-tiered online learning model. This paper describes the details about the two-tiered online learning model first. Then, the teaching experience on using the Java Web Service Developer's Pack (JWSDP) tutorial is provided. Finally, the advantages of the two-tier online learning model are summarized.