11-08-2012, 11:24 AM
Online Education Portal
Education_Portal.doc (Size: 3.86 MB / Downloads: 123)
Abstract:
The purpose of the project is to address the critical subset of important issues, and adopting an approach to address these using a holistic intervention utilizing modern technology. It uses an ICT enabled process involving both synchronous and asynchronous mode to actually reach out and engage a large number of our teachers, and through them, a much larger number of students. Indeed, actual involvement of these important stakeholders in the entire process, scaled to very large numbers using ICT, can be said to be a major contribution of the project. The web portal that is being developed serves as a one stop learning place for the student and teacher community by providing various kinds of learning materials.
Introduction:
There has been a phenomenal rise in the number of engineering colleges in India over the past decade. Over 6,00,000 students are now annually admitted to different engineering disciplines. There is an urgent need to enhance quality of education, given the relatively weak academic infrastructure, especially as regards to availability of qualified faculty.
Under National Mission on Education, IIT has been organizing workshops
on various topics over the years to train engineering faculty from such colleges and universities from all over the country. Henceforth many resources including video recordings, assignments, question banks created need to be made public
along with discussion forum for their effective usage. Thus this portal serves as a platform for the hosting of all the content in a well categorized manner.
Description:
A .Net based portal is implemented to achieve the targets in an effective manner. The portal supports the following major aspects of utilization:
• Topic-wise search and viewing of video content
• A very large collection of tutorials and projects for explaining subjects
• Topic-wise creation of quizzes
• Separate discussion forums for teachers and students
• Profile management for each registered user
Document Description:
• Purpose of this document :
To provide the technical description of the working of web portal
• Scope of this document :
The portal being released in open source, this document acts as a guide to the open source community who may be working on the portal (both enhancement or re-use) in the future
• Product used :
Joomla 1.6 Content Management System (CMS)
• References :
Help and Support included as a part of the web portal
• Abbreviations :
CMS - Content Management System
PHP – PHP is Hypertext Preprocessor
HTML – HyperText Markup Language
MySQL – My Structured Query Language
Project Outline:
The work has been divided into 6 major modules:
1. Front-End Design and Quiz module
2. API design and Database Management module
3. Video Content Management module
4. User Management module
5. Resources Management module
6. On-Screen Editor module
7. Forum Management module
Related software or hardware:
• Software/Languages : Asp .Net, SQL Server, HTML, CSS, Java Script, AJAX.
• Web Servers : IIS server
• Operating systems : Windows 7 : Ultimate
• End-user characteristics : A User with basic Computer knowledge and Internet skills
• Scope for the future evolution of the project : More involvement of web community for the optimal maintenance of the ever growing learning resources
General Constraints:
• Constraints encountered because of Joomla 1.6:
o Less open source template availability leading to limited scope for the front end design
o Difficulty in session maintenance for the users
o Limited number of plugins available for Joomla 1.6 to meet the requirements of the project
• End-user constraints :
o Javascript enabled browsers supporting CSS3, HTML5 and a minimum Flash Player version 8
• Standards compliance :
o Front End Design in compliance with Web 2.0 standards
o Code structure has been maintained meeting the W3C standards
• Protocol requirements :
o RTMP protocols for the streaming of video content
• Data repository and distribution requirements :
o Hierarchal file structure for the maintenance of various resources : assignments, projects, tutorials, videos
• Memory Limitations :
o Maximum upload file size is 5MB owing to php ini restrictions
• Goals and Guidelines *
• Working, looking, or "feeling" like an existing product :
o The functioning of quiz module is inspired from BITSAT (Birla Institute of Technology Sciences Aptitude Test)
Reason: BITSAT caters students all over India and provide them with questions chosen from a very large question pool. This is a timer controlled quiz with a feature of marking questions for review.
Our quiz with a highly flexible selection process which include time of the quiz, number of questions, topic selection and many more strives to increase the user experience considerably. There is a scope for additional features like giving quiz in any order of priority of subject/topic.
• Development Methods :
Incremental Development : The primary objective of this kind of implementation is to reduce inherent project risk by breaking a project into smaller segments and providing more ease-of-change during the development process.
Forum Management module:
The purpose of having a forum is to have an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat room in that messages are at least temporarily archived. The forum is made for people of almost all ages who have basic knowledge of computer and are willing to use forum for exchanging knowledge.
For implementing forum, we have used the 'Kunena 1.6’ which comes under GPL/GNU v2 license. For the chat module we have used 'FreiChat 2.5 plugin ' under the same GPL v2 license
Forums have some specific set of jargon associated with them. A single topic started is called a "Thread". Depending on the forum set-up, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in in order to post messages. Usually users do not have to log in to read existing messages.