Integration of a course management system with interactive educational multimedia

With the recent emergence of open source course management systems, learning support infrastructures have received increased attention. More and more organisations adopt these systems to provide their educational services. Often, existing, locally developed learning support software – ranging from delivery support to multimedia content – have to be integrated into these new systems. We will report here on approaches to integrate educational multimedia into a (open source) course management system. We will use our own courseware environment – IDLE, the Interactive Database Learning Environment – and its integration into Moodle – an open source course management systems – to illustrate our experience

Migrating existing multimedia courseware to Moodle

Open source course management systems offer increased flexibility for instructors and instructional designers. Communities can influence the development of these systems and on an individual basis, the possibility to modify the system software exists. Migrating existing courseware to these systems can therefore be beneficial, sometimes even required. We report here about our experience in migrating an existing courseware system consisting of multimedia content and interactive, integrated infrastructure functionality to an open source course management system called Moodle. We will assess the difficulties that we have encountered during this process and, discuss the importance of standards in this context, and we aim to provide other instructors or instructional designers with guidelines and assessment support for other migration projects

Bringing Global Sourcing into The Classroom: Experiential Learning Via a Global Software Development Project

The growing trend in offshore software development has imposed new skills requirements on collaborating global partners. In the U.S. this has translated into skill sets that include communications, project management, business analysis, and team management. In a virtual setting, these skills take on a complex proportion. This paper describes an educational initiative in offshore software development between undergraduate students enrolled in a project management course at Marquette University, USA and graduate business students enrolled in an Information Systems Analysis and Design course at Management Development Institute, India. The course replicated an offshore client/vendor relationship in a virtual setting. For faculty considering such initiatives, this paper describes the setting and factors critical to success of this initiative and cautions against others that can be detrimental to such an effort

Course management systems in higher education: understanding student experiences

The course management system, as an evolving tool and innovation, is increasingly used to promote the quality, efficiency and flexibility of teaching and learning in higher education. However, the ways that course management systems can support and enhance the quality of teaching and learning needs further investigation. This paper describes findings of an exploratory study into undergraduate and postgraduate students’ experiences of course management systems, and aims to provide insights into issues concerning the implementation of such systems in higher education. The exploration focuses on the following aspects: perceived usefulness of technologies for study; usage pattern of course management systems; students’ perceptions of course management systems; user support preference; and self-reported experiences. Significant differences between academic levels of students are evident. Findings of the study shed light on issues concerning technology, pedagogy, and implementation strategies of course management systems in higher education.postprin

Digital classrooms, public profiles

Framed by the larger questions of digital representation and course management systems, I examine how instructors perceive customized student profile on course management systems. For this exploratory study, I have surveyed 41 instructors and interviewed 9 instructors of English 150 and 250 in the English Department to examine how these instructors use both CMS and student profiles inside and outside of the classroom at Iowa State University. This study has found that instructors use their course management systems in various online ways: as online syllabi, as workshops for their students, as homework hubs, and as an extension of the classroom. Five main themes from this study include course management systems as a space, course management systems as a resource, boundaries between the physical and online classrooms, online identities through user profiles, and course management systems versus social media

Implementing integrated university systems

University Management Systems are systems that integrate management of the core functions of the University like Academic Management (AMS),Financial Management (FMS),Library Management (LMS), Course Management System (CMS), Human Resource Management (HRM).University Management Systems are systems that integrate management of the core functions of the University like Academic Management (AMS),Financial Management (FMS),Library Management (LMS), Course Management System (CMS), Human Resource Management (HRM)

Enterprise Information Systems and Business Process Modelling in Training and Research

The University of Debrecen introduced the five year “informatics agricultural engineer” course in the 2002/2003 academic year. In the 2006/2007 the „informatics and agricultural administration engineer“ BSc course has been introduced. The courses are run by the Agricultural Economics and Rural Development faculty. Starting of this course is demanded by the Hungarian agro-food sector, Governmental offices, Institutes, which need the applications of wide range informatics tools and systems. The business process modelling and management is becoming important part of implementing and running information systems. The ARIS is one of the leader products in modelling. The other important system is the SAP in the ERP market. In our education program we are using these products. The ARIS toolset is very useful for research on business modelling in agri-food companies too

De-Fragmenting Knowledge: Using Metadata for Interconnecting Courses

E-learning systems are often based on the notion of "course": an interconnected set of resources aiming at presenting material related to a particular topic. Course authors do provide external links to related material. Such external links are however "frozen" at the time of publication of the course. Metadata are useful for classifying and finding e-learning artifacts. In many cases, metadata are used by Learning Management Systems to import, export, sequence and present learning objects. The use of metadata by humans is in general limited to a search functionality, e.g. by authors who search for material that can be reused. We argue that metadata can be used to enrich the interconnection among courses, and to present to the student a richer variety of interconnected resources. We implemented a system that presents an instance of this idea

Learning roadmap studio : new approaches and strategies for efficient learning and training processes

Learning systems have emerged in a set of different information systems, oriented for different kinds of organizations and institutions, such as learning management systems, knowledge management systems and learning content management systems, which can be integrated or merged with others. From past experience, it has been denoted that strategies and pedagogical processes are tasks that can be created, enriched and boosted by actors who participate in learning and training processes: course managers, teachers and students. The challenge posed to the different actors involved also accelerates the changes that have been happening in education and training, empowering a society based on knowledge. Initiatives such as eLearning (EU Comission 2000), eLearningEurope, eTwinning and Education Observatories are an evidence of this challenge. Platforms, applications, tools and systems must respond to challenges that those actors face nowadays: heterogeneous target audiences, in terms of student profiles, number of participants, differentiated contents and schedules to achieve knowledge, outcomes and competences. Thus, a prototype application, named Learning Roadmap Studio (LRMS), has been developed and deployed at Aveiro Norte Polytechnic School of the University of Aveiro, in order to suppress gaps in learning processes and to power better learning and training. It represents a new challenge for the University of Aveiro for higher education and is already being tested. At its core is the concept of “learning roadmaps” that act upon two fundamental axes: education and learning. For the teachers, it aims at becoming a self-supporting tool that stimulates the organization and management of the course materials (lectures, presentations, multimedia content, and evaluation materials, amongst others). For the students, the learning roadmap aims at promoting self-study and supervised study, endowing the pupil with the capabilities to find the relevant information and to capture the concepts in the study materials. The outcome will be a stimulating learning process together with an organized management of those materials. It is not intended to create new learning management systems. Instead, it is presented as an application that enables the edition and creation of learning processes and strategies, giving primary relevance to teachers, instead of focusing on tools, features and contents