-

An approach to organizing universal programming environment, intended to form the departmental document-oriented data warehouse of the educational institution, is offered in the article. Available possibility of individual design of business logic that is generally characteristic for educational activities. The concept of specialized warehouse of semistructured data is based on the logical model “object-attribute-value”, which allows not only to store electronic documents with a different sets of attributes, but also to maintain the dynamics of these sets.-

Reference Architecture for e-Learning Solutions

In deze scriptie worden de volgende drie modellen en raamwerken voor e-Learning besproken: het e-Learning raamwerk ontwikkeld voor de UKeU, het model voor Web-based Instructional Systems ontwikkeld door Retalis en Avgeriou en het LTSA ontwikkeld door het IEEE. Deze drie modellen vormen de theoretische basis voor een Managed Learning Environment die als domeinmodel dienen voor e-Learning oplossingen

Medición y evaluación de calidad en uso de aplicaciones web

El empleo masivo de productos software, impulsado en el último lustro por el crecimiento de Internet y la WWW, ha puesto a los usuarios finales como referentes potenciales para la evaluación de calidad de productos software. La industria respondió a la demanda de un mercado global en crecimiento, pero esa respuesta no siempre tuvo en cuenta las exigencias de calidad y calidad en uso de usuarios cada vez más numerosos y mejor formados. Referencias importantes en la discusión y la propuesta de esta tesis son varios de los estándares de la organización ISO/IEC. Específicamente en relación a calidad en uso, se consideraron el estándar 9126-1 y el borrador del estándar 9126-4. En esta tesis se propone un enfoque ingenieril para medir y evaluar la calidad en uso, o sea la calidad percibida por los usuarios en contextos reales de uso, de productos software para la Web. Partiendo de estándares ISO/IEC, en particular el estándar 9126-1 y el borrador del estándar 9126-4, la propuesta, de carácter sistemático y disciplinado, está encuadrada por un marco de medición y evaluación, basado a su vez en una ontología de métricas e indicadores. El marco ofrece precisiones en las definiciones necesarias para la medición y evaluación-por ejemplo: necesidad de información, modelo de concepto, concepto calculable, métrica e indicador - y líneas guía para las actividades que deben llevar a cabo usuarios y evaluadores. La ejecución de una instancia del marco de medición se plasmó en un caso de estudio. Para llevar adelante el caso de estudio se empleó la metodología WebQEM, diseñada para evaluación de calidad de productos Web, cuyas etapas tienen relación directa con el marco de medición y evaluación. Un reto importante fue adaptar la metodología para evaluar calidad en uso. El caso de estudio se realizó con la participación de usuarios reales de una aplicación para e-Learning. El diseño de las métricas e indicadores empleados en el caso de estudio constituye uno de los aporte significativos de esta tesis ya que, si bien los resultados de este tipo de evaluaciones no son generalizables, se generaron metadatos provenientes de definiciones exhaustivas que pueden constituir líneas base para proyectos similares. Como líneas de trabajo futuro se visualiza la necesidad de contar con instrumentos específicos para afrontar la evaluación de los aspectos subjetivos, particularmente satisfacción, y considerar, para tener un panorama completo de la calidad en uso de la aplicación Web evaluada, el punto de vista de otros perfiles de usuario involucrados.Facultad de Informátic

The development of a model for organising educational resources on an Intranet

The twenty-first century has found education at the crossroads of change. There are burgeoning challenges facing the modern educator. To rise to the importuning, educators find themselves turning to Information Technology for the answers. The technologies utilised in attempts to overcome the challenges often include the Internet and electronic educational resources. Although the Internet is not unduly called the Information Highway, it is also fraught with misleading and incorrect information. Educators’ arduous searches result in few good and useable resources. Thus, to store, organise and efficiently retrieve the discovered resources is a matter of time-saving. The aim of the study was to develop a method to organise and retrieve educational resources in an efficient and personalised manner. In order to do this, an exploration into pedagogy and educational paradigms was undertaken. The current educational paradigm, constructivism, proposes that each learner is an individual with unique learning and personal needs. To develop a new model, the current models need to be understood. The current solutions for the organising of educational resources are realised as several software packages, also called e-learning packages. A list of criteria that describes the essential requirements for organising educational resources was established. These criteria were based upon the pedagogical principles prescribed by educators and the practical technological frameworks necessary to fulfil the needs of the teaching/learning situation. These criteria were utilised to critique and explore the available solutions. It was found that although the available e-learning packages fulfil a need within their genre, it does not meet with the core requirements of constructivism. The resource base model seeks to address these needs by focussing on the educational aspects of resource delivery over an Intranet. For the purposes of storing, organising and delivering the resources, a database had to be established. This database had to have numerous qualities, including the ability to search and retrieve resources with great efficiency. Retrieving data in an efficient manner is the forte of the star schema, while the storing and organising of data is the strength of a normalised schema. It is not standard practice to utilise both types of schemas within the same database. A star schema is usually reserved for data warehouses because of its data retrieval abilities. It is customary to utilise a normalised schema for operational databases. The resource base model, however, needs both the storage facilities of an operational database and the efficient query facilities of a data warehouse. The resource base model, therefore, melds both schemas into one database with interlinking tables. This database forms the foundation (or the back-end) of the resource base. The resource base model utilises web browsers as its user interface (or front-end). The results of the study on the pedagogy, the current e-learning solutions and the resource base were written up within this dissertation. The contribution that this dissertation makes is the development of a technique to efficiently store, organise and retrieve educational resources in such a manner that both the requirements of constructivism and outcomes-based education are fulfilled. To this end, a list of technological and pedagogical criteria on which to critique a resource delivery technique has been developed. This dissertation also elaborates on the schema designs chosen for the resource base, namely the normalised schema and the star schema. From this schema, a prototype has been developed. The prototype’s function was two-fold. The first function is to determine the feasibility of the technique. Secondly, to determine the success of the technique in fulfilling the needs expressed in the list of criteri

Modelling Web-Based Instructional Systems

The size and complexity of modern instructional systems, which are based on the World Wide Web, bring about great intricacy in their crafting, as there is not enough knowledge or experience in this field. This imposes the use of new instructional design models in order to achieve risk-mitigation, cost and time efficiency, high pedagogical quality of the end product, which will capitalise on the potential of the networked technologies. This paper presents a model for constructing such systems, using a problem-solving approach that defines the solution of an instructional problem in both a pedagogical and a technical manner in a holistic view. This model tries to standardise the development of such systems supporting reusability at the design as well as the implementation level. The pedagogical or non-technical solution is comprised of five interconnected sets of learning elements: the learning objectives, the didactic events, the syllabus, the assessment procedure and other issues like prerequisites, fees, technical constraints, etc. This first form of the solution is then transformed into a technical form that contains implementation sub-systems: the human subsystem, the learning resources subsystem, and the technical infrastructure subsystem. These subsystems are perceived as independent, autonomous entities that interact with each other through critical interfaces in a holistic fashion. The technical solution is therefore the system architecture of the web-based instructional system, which is engineered to satisfy the requirements specified by the pedagogical solution. The proposed model has been empirically derived from actual web-based instructional systems, supporting undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the Computer Science discipline. One of these courses is presented in this paper, serving as a case study, and exhibiting the formulation of both types of the solution. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the Web-based instructional systems, constructed with the proposed model, a summative evaluation method is employed that makes use of pre-test and post-test questionnaires. This evaluation method is briefly presented, together with a summary of its results on the case study course. Finally the proposed model is examined in the context of current standardization efforts in the field of Learning Technology Systems. Specifically it is demonstrated how the model can conform to the Learning Technology System Architecture draft standard of IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee. In conclusion, the model has shown encouraging results in the four systems it has been applied to. We mean to further elaborate on the model by employing it, to construct more instructional systems. We also aim in coding design experience in the field, in the well-established form of design patterns.