The e-learning system provides the development of the learning process by organizing and correlating the following: general managerial activities, organizing activities of the learning process, sustaining activities of the learning process. This article cInternet, multimedia technologies, e-learning, professor, students

Serbanescu Luminita

English

Research Papers in Economics

1056 
DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION A PLATFORM FOR E-LEARNING WITH MULTIMEDIA 
TECHNOLOGY 
 
Şerbănescu Lumini a  
University  of  Piteşti  Faculty  of  Economics  Sciences  Piteşti,  str.  Negru-Vodă,  bl.  D3,  sc.  a,  ap.  1,  Argeş 
luminitaserb@yahoo.com 0745030906 
 
The e-learning system provides the development of the learning process by organizing and correlating the following: general 
managerial activities, organizing activities of the learning process, sustaining activities of the learning process. This article 
contents a detailed analysis of the application conception way for the management of the students’ activity in a faculty(data 
structures,  functionalities,  projecting  and  realizing  the  application).  E-learning  platform  implemented(which  allows  the 
student to access the didactic material anytime and anywhere, this way developing mobility and easiness in the theoretical 
activity) offers a support for teaching and learning, for testing and evaluation, for administrate the curriculum area and for 
monitoring the whole learning process The platform has four types of users, of which three of them playing administrative 
roles (administrator, secretary, professor) and one of them is for the students.  
 
Keywords: Internet, multimedia technologies, e-learning,  professor, students 
 
JEL Classification: C88(Other Computer Software), I23(Higher Education Research Institutions) 
 
The present quality of education needs improvement, and the education institutions should be receptive to the 
economic and social realities and exigencies, the european problems, the labour market requirements. 
One should not omit the fact that the education institutions in Romania has to run on a competition education 
market and this requires a higher managerial autonomy of each institution, a flexible normative background and a 
proper  financing,  in  order  to  face  competition.  To  be  competitive  means  more  opening,  transparency  and 
competition, a revision of services and marketing culture according to the realities and values of the European 
education system (as the cultural diversity, the research orientation).  
As  the  information  technologies  are  widely  used,  the  actual  problems  in  Romania  referring  to  e-learning  are 
technology development and joining the educational standards on Internet, and on the other hand, their proper 
application by as many users as possible. The user of the present society (based on knowledge) is any person 
willing to be trained in a certain field, according to his/ her knowledge degree and cognitive need in a certain 
context. 
This article provides a solution to improve and make efficient the management of students from a faculty, using the 
Web technologies. The application is divided into 5 modules:  
  - the public module provides a series of information regarding the distance learning (the profiles of each 
faculty, how to register, the admittance methodology, the educational offer); 
  - the administrator module provides the necessary functions to manage the organizational chart of the 
university and the account management; 
  - the secretariat module provides the necessary functions to manage the organizational chart of the profiles, 
as well as the necessary functions to manage students’ activities; 
  -  the  teacher  module  provides  the  necessary  functions  to  manage  the  organizational  chart  of  courses, 
laboratories and examinations, as well as the necessary functions to manage students’ activities; 
  -  the  student  module  offer  the  students  the  possibilities  to  get  note  books  and  courses,  information 
regarding the activity during the courses, or to discuss with their colleagues and tutors through chat or e-mail. 
The main aim of this system is the development of a medium easy to be used both by the students and the teachers. 
The success of the application depends on the teacher’s availability to make known this system provided with a 
qualitative educational content and with a questions set relevant in number and content[1]. By  means of this 
system,  the  teachers  may  offer  the  students  learning  unities  in  digital  format  as  well  as  questions  for  self-
evaluating. The created e-learning platform is developed on the Microsoft  Active Server Pages  technology and 
can be used in any network  based on a Windows server. The database is created with Microsoft Access Aplication 
and contains 30 tables and in 16 of them there are different types of relations. 
 
1. The public module provides information regarding the educational, the admittance methodology and the user’s 
guide. The model also provides information regarding the faculties that run within the university, the profiles of 
each faculty and the number of positions, the tuition and what to do to become a student. 
  This module offers information regarding the education plan of each profile for each university year, the 
students registered for distance learning and their school records. All events of the university the students and 
teachers may participate in (conferences, seminars) may be found here. If a student does not access the pages of 
educational resources for 30 consecutive days, then he/ she will receive an e-mail that he/ she has to participate in 
the educational process, when a user of the public module access it.    
 1057 
2. The administrator module. The functions offered by the administration module are very important, because the 
other modules and functions depend on them. The functions of the administration module may be grouped into the 
following categories: functions necessary to the organizational chart of the university: faculty updates, profile 
updates,  teacher  update;  functions  necessary  to  account  management:  updating  the  administrator’s  personal 
account,  updating  the  teachers’  and  secretaries’  accounts;  functions  necessary  to  communicate:  forum 
administration.  The  administration  panel  of  the  forum  is  the  place  where  most  configurations  are  made.  The 
administrator controls here the forum and category organization, and may configure the forum names and self 
cleaning settings. 
 
 
Figure 1 Administrator Module – Listing the existing specialization 
 
The administrator having an account for the application may introduce in a form the account name and password, 
and when clicking OK the application will check if there is such an account and password. According to the testing 
results made by the application, the administrator will be allowed to access the functions of the respective module 
corresponding to his/ her account, otherwise an error message will be displayed. 
I will choose the operation of profile update to exemplify this. The administrator is allowed to do the following 
operations(see figure 1): 
  - list the existing specialization; 
  - add new specialization; 
  - change a specialization; 
  - delete a specialization; 
  - update secretary account. 
 
3. The secretary module provides functionalities necessary for the administration of the organizing structure of 
specializations  as  well  as  functionalities  necessary  for  the  administration  of  the  students’  activity(updating  of 
university and learning years, of students and studying plan). 
The data is organized on calendaristic years. There are links to the study years for every calendaristic year. On the 
first adding of a calendar year the Ist study year is created automatically.  
Since there are no major structural changes from one year to the next one, all the data from the past year is 
transfered to the newly created year in order to help the secretary. This data is about the curricular areas copied for 
the first year, the eventual differences are to be manually operated by the secretary later on. Even more, the 
students  which  accumulated  a  certain  amount  of  credit  points  established  by  the  secretary,  are  going  to  be 
automatically transfered to the new study year. This is the reason why the operation of adding a new study year is 
possible only from the moment of finalizing the previous calendar year. The students in the final years are going to 
be transfered to the next year wich does not exist in the educational system so for these students is going to be 
automatically generated the registration certificate after the graduation of the licence(degree) exam. 
The creation of a curricular area involves establishing the study subjects for every study year, the specific credit 
points, the manner of evaluation(exam or preliminary examination), the universitary term of study for each subject, 
the teacher in charge of the course and the tutor. The actualization of teachers is made by the administrator, the 
secretary being able to choose from a given list  the teacher and the tutor in charge of every course. The secretary 
can  display  all the  existing  subjects  in  the  curricular  area,  each  being  provided  with  modify  and  erase/delete 
options. 
The secretary can display all the students taking the specialization he is in charge of, as well as the data containing 
the registration number, student’s class, e-mail address, acount username and password. The acount username and 
the password are given to the student in the moment of registration. These fields are automatically generated by the 
application and are no subject of alteration by the student or the secretary. 1058 
a). Academic status (situation). Always, before passing to a new calendaristic year, in order to execute the right 
data transfer, the secretary has to access the „Academic situation” page. When this page is accessed, the data of 
each student are updated in the tbl_calculstud table as follows: 
  - the number of passed (taken) exams is calculated; 
  - establishing the number of the not passed exams; 
  - establishing the number of credit points acumulated; 
  - the calculation of the year’s graduation average mean 
  There are two information cathegories offered: 
- a statistical situation concerning the number of passed exams, the number of not passed exams, the graduation 
mean of the previous study year, the total amount of credit points acumulated by the students registered for the 
distance education. The data can be displayed using the following selection cathegories: 
  - students in alphabetic order 
  - students in decreasing mean order 
  -  students grouped in classes (study groups) 
  - searching students by their names (this option is particulary useful for the people knowing students 
registered to the distance education such as parents, mates, friends) 
- the academic situation of a student in a specific universitary study year and the graduation mean for the year. Here 
are also availeble  the credit points obtained for for each subject in the curricular area, the university term of study 
and the manner of evaluation. This information is available in a printed version as well. (as seen in figure 4) 
b). Registration certificates. For the graduates, the academic situation for all the study years is contained in the 
diploma/certificate supplement. The secretary is filling data in this supplement only in some specified fields, the 
rest being automatically generated according to student’s academic results. The supplement may be filled on line 
and printed or saved as a Word document, saved completely and printed eventually. In order to save it as a 
document, the secretary has to choose the “Save As” option from the “File” menu, to choose the position on disk to 
keep the file, to name the document and use the .doc extension. This second option is recommended, this way the 
data is going to be saved and easily used at a later time.  
To generate the registration certificates the annual mean was calculated using two exact decimal places without 
rounding up, the annual sum of credit points, the general mean of all the study years, the total of credit points, the 
position of the graduate out of the total of graduates. 
c). Centralizing records. This option is usefull for the secretary to display the students’ results both for printing as 
well as keeping them in the registration certificates. Using the centralizing records, the secretary is able to provide 
more and quicker information for the students concerning their academic situation. The students are displayed by 
classes. For every student is displayed the academic situation as follows: 
  - the marks/grades of passed exams in black; 
  - the not passed exams in red; 
  - missing/absence of an exam in green 
  We choose this manner of displaying data in order to assist the secretary in producing various statistics 
about passing exams, absences or not passing exams. 
 
 
Figure 2. Centralizing records 
 
4. The teacher module provides functionalities necessary to administrate the course organizational structure( the 
materials  divided  in  chapters),  the  examination  schedule,  evaluation  forms  and  students’activity.  This  module 
includes the students’communication by chat or mail.. Functionalities offered by the teacher module are grouped in 
the following categories: 1059 
  - functionalities necessary to the administration of the organizing structure of the courses: the transmission 
of the course materials, presentations of the chapters from the material 
  - functionalities necessary to the examination of the students: the establishing of the evaluating form, of the 
on-line tests of the chapters which come across in the examination 
  - functionalities necessary to the administration of the students’ activity during the courses: pointing the 
students’ activity at the examinations 
a). The hand filling in of the catalogues. Taking into account the groups of students, the teacher can complete the 
catalogues by introducing the marks in a form. First of all, each student has 5 spaces for marks ( the student can 
repeat the examination 5 times). The teacher must first choose the date for the examination and the number of 
marks of which the final mark is formed (a mark if the teacher chooses only one summative evaluation or more if 
more examinations are wished). 
For each student in a group there are three columns representing the obtained mark, date of examination as well as 
the possibility of improving the mark. This last column after the first passed examination, appears a cassette of 
validation. If the student asks for improving the mark, the teacher fills this cassette of the respective student, giving 
him this possibility(see figure 3). This is an important aspect because after the first exam session, the teacher can 
mark only those students who haven’t passed the exam or who have chosen to improve the mark. 
At  a  new  examination,  the  teacher  has  the  possibility  to  mark  only  those  students  who  haven’t  passed  the 
examination or who wanted to improve the mark, if the validation cassette was filled, the teacher having thus a 
clear situation of the passed examinations and of the re-examinations. After each exam session, the teacher has the 
possibility to list the catalogues and to save them in a file on PC.     
 
 
Figure 3. Filled in rolls 
 
b). The automatic filling of the catalogues. The teacher has the possibility to complete the catalogues in accordance 
with the obtained grade sat the on-line tests at the first exam session or at the re-examination sessions. Thus, after 
filling  in  the  date  of  the  examination  and  the  number  of  marks,  the  teacher  must  fill  in  the  dates  when  the 
examinations took place and the percentage of each mark(see figure 4). At the first examination, all students will be 
listed who didn’t pass the on-line examination or the missing students, and at a new examination all will be 
generated automatically in the catalogue only for those students who haven’t passed the examination or asked the 
improving of the grade. 
 
 
Figure. 4. The form for filling in rolls with many marks 
If the student tries to sustain the examination for several times at the established date because he is not satisfied 
with the grade, all his marks are saved in a table in the data base, and when the catalogue is generated, the obtained 
mark of the first testing is taken into consideration. 
 
5. The student module offers the students the possibility to acquire note books and courses, information regarding 
the activity during the present courses, self evaluating tests for each chapter of the course, or to discuss with their 1060 
colleagues and tutors through chat or e-mail and see the project topic they have to do, as well as the structure of the 
group  they  are  part  of. The  student  module  offers to  a  student  (who  has an  account  for  the  application)  the 
following functions: 
  - the possibility to access all course materials for all the subjects studied in the respective semester; 
  - chapter presentations for each subject;  
  - the possibility to access the virtual an online laboratories (for certain subjects); 
  - online testing and self testing for each chapter;  
  - listing the final marks for each subject of the current semester; 
  - communicating with their colleagues and subject tutor. 
 
Conclusions 
The Web application aims the improving of the teacher’s work in administrating the students’ activity at the 
courses which these attend in the present semester. By the means of the web application, the students have access 
anytime at the information referring to their activity at a certain course, and the natural errors and the losses which 
could appear because of the human mistakes, are completely eliminated. 
The most important functionalities which are available for the administrator, the secretary, the tutors or the students 
of this application are: 
  - the possibility of saving and updating the specializations in a faculty, as well as the disciplines of each 
specialization (year and semester organized courses – the school program) – administrator account 
  - administration of the teacher’s and students’ accounts – by means of the administrator account 
  - the possibility to set each course, the list of teachers and tutors as well as the of students attending the 
courses – the secretary account 
  - the possibility to save the information offered by the teachers about the students during the semester 
(partial marks, final examination mark) – teacher and secretary account 
  - the automatic calculation in accordance with the established settings, final marks of the student sat each 
course in the semester 
  - the possibility to access in real time the information about the students activity at a certain course – 
student account     
 
Bibliography 
1. Bear J., Bear M., Bear's Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning, Education, Ten Speed Press, 2003, 432 
p. 
2. Joi a E., Management educa ional. Profesorul-manager: roluri şi metodologie, Ed. Polirom, Iaşi, 2000, p.182. 
3. Goldfarb B., Visual Pedagogy, Media Cultures in and beyond Classroom, Education, Duke University Press, 
2002, 264 p. 
4. Roberts T.S.,Computer Supported Collaborative Learning in Higher Education, Education, Idea Group Inc (IGI), 
2004, 322 p. 
5. Sava Simona, Teorie şi practică în educa ia la distan ă, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, 2003. 
6. Şerbănescu Lumini a, Student support in distance learning, Sesiunea Interna ională de Comunicări Ştiin ifice, 
ECAI 2005, Piteşti 
   

Bear's Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning,

Management educa ional. Profesorul-manager: roluri şi metodologie,

Roberts T.S.,Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

Şerbănescu Lumini a, Student support in distance learning, Sesiunea Interna ională de Comunicări Ştiin ifice, ECAI

Teorie şi practică în educa ia la distan ă, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică,

Visual Pedagogy, Media Cultures in and beyond Classroom, Education,

DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION A PLATFORM FOR E-LEARNING WITH MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY

http://steconomice.uoradea.ro/anale/volume/2009/v4-management-and-marketing/217.pdf

DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION A PLATFORM FOR E-LEARNING WITH MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Research Papers in Economics