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

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