“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:

1. 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.
2. To manage credentials and silently authenticate 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 in each platform.
3. To report to the VLE the results of exercises and activities made by students inside the 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)
• Remote content (similar to Remote SCORM, but using web services to communicate student results from textbook platforms to 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