Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad
Bizkul eLearning Portal
Project Report
Submitted by :
Ramprasad NNR
rnnr_b05@iiita.ac.in
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Allahabad
(Deemed University)
(A Centre of Excellence in Information Technology Established by
Govt. of India)
Candidates’ Declaration
I hereby declare that the work presented in this project proposal entitled
“Bizkul e-Learning Portal” submitted towards compilation of VIIIth semester project of B.Tech. (IT) at Kuliza Technologies Pvt Ltd, Bangalore, is an authentic record of my original work being carried out under the guidance of Chirag Parmar, Kuliza Technologies Pvt Ltd, Bangalore and supervision of Dr. Ratna Sanyal, Associate Professor, IIIT Allahabad. The project will be done in full compliance with the requirements and constraints of prescribe curriculum and a complete report will be submitted before end semester evaluation.
Place: - Bangalore Ramprasad NNR
Date: -10th March, 2009 B2005064
Kuliza Technologies Pvt Ltd, Bangalore
Certificate
This is to certify that the project work entitled “Bizkul-Triage e-Learning Portal” is being carried out for compilation of VIIIth semester project of B.Tech(IT) at Kuliza Technologies, Bangalore. The above declaration made by the candidates is correct to the best of my knowledge and belief.
Place: Kuliza Technologies, Bangalore
Date: 10th March, 2009 Chirag Parmar
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Allahabad
(Deemed University)
(A Centre of Excellence in Information Technology Established by
Govt. of India)
Candidates’ Declaration
This is to certify that the project work entitled “Bizkul e-learning portal” is being carried out for compilation of VIIIth semester project of B.Tech. (IT) at Kuliza Technologies Pvt Ltd, Bangalore. The above declaration made by the candidates is correct to the best of my knowledge and belief.
Place: - Allahabad Dr. Ratna Sanyal
Date: - Associate Professor
IIIT Allahabad
Content:
Topic ……………………………………………….. 6
Motivation …………………………………………. 7
Problem definition …………………………………. 8
Literature Survey …………………………………... 10
Moodle Directory Structure
Plug-ins and Third party tools
Plan of Work ……………………………………….. 19
Requirements of the portal
Work done and Flow of work
References ………………………………………….. 22
Topic
Developing e-Learning portal for the Business Management course with effective Course Management techniques and advanced features for interactive teaching, sharing and assessment of the knowledge by the Experts in the respective fields.
Motivation: -
Learning is a process of gaining knowledge which is required by everyone in day to day life. Learning is a continuous process throughout the life which is important in the fields which are dynamically changes or having newly raised challenges.
One of those fields is Medical field in which everyday new type of challenges arises and solutions are experimentally generated and which requires a series of discussions over the disease or viruses or the drugs fabricated for them. These types of discussions are generally called as “Triage” in Latin.
Similarly in the field of Business Management where every day market is dynamic situation which requires expert’s analysis and suggestions and each every day new customers are joining in the market to participate which makes the situation even combined with the continuous learning process of the users. This business management training or learning process is called as “Bizkul”
For these entire field’s continuous learning process and suggestions are required along with the learning material for new comers which creates the basic need of the learning portal and erase the distance internet is used for the learning purpose which in combined created the e-Learning portal. According to Luskin “e” in e-Learning can be interpreted as exciting, energetic, enthusiastic, emotional, extended, excellent, and educational in addition to "electronic". These eLearning portals are gaining popularity in the advanced research fields than when compared to the fields that elementary level. The scope of eLearning systems and certification can be seen by the statistics of SUN Microsystems reached million of online Java certified students and in 2006 3.5 million students are enrolled in USA for e-learning portals.
These E-learning portals are enhanced with by the Virtual Classrooms and Web Conferencing through which the medium of e-learning portals moved from static data to the dynamic environment of the e-learning courses. Today e-learning portals are tending to the blended learning by incorporating many different styles of learning process by simulations, games, Brainstorming session and other interactive case studies.
These e-learning systems are having the advantage over the face-face learning systems are
Reducing environmental impact by erasing distances.
Quality and affordable education by area experts
Convenience and flexible learning by providing offline data resources
3. Problem Definition:-
Bizkul is e-learning portal with basic features
Course Management and enrolling Techniques
Assigning Roles
Easy of adding Modules
Central Directory Structure for the modules and Administrative blocks
Virtual Class Rooms with Podcasting and Live video conference and webinars
Assessment of the students.
Along with these basic features interactive sessions and other online and offline resources sharing of Content Management systems and the language independent and user dependent language controlling of the portal minimal requirements from the client side to install or to use the portal for the interactive sessions.
The basic portal should support different course formats along with the knowledge sharing techniques like wiki, discussion forums and other blogs.
4. Literature survey:-
E-Learning is a way of sharing knowledge through computer and internet based techniques. E-Learning systems are empowered by use of Pedagogical elements. The importance of e-learning system is not only fixed for the distance education using a share statistical material also but for also training, dynamic interaction of the people and assessment of the people by the instructor to assess the training session and to improve the effectiveness of the portal.
Any learning system can be divided into some major categories based upon the interaction of the student and instructor.
Face to Face.
Learn on Demand.
Learn in Real Time.
Learn through Collaboration.
Productive tools.
Assessment.
Each category is interrelated to each other and depends upon the quality of the other. For example Video creation and sharing of the videos in Learn through Collaboration is same as the Podcast of the videos in Learn on Demand.
These e-learning portals are used as strategy of training of the employees in the companies and some Universities are also sharing their research work with the students and other institutes to contribute in the research by using wikis which are basic discussion and idea sharing databases which are integrated in the e-learning portal for example e-Learning portal by Stanford provides the online podcasting of videos and mp3 audio files and also provides resource sharing of the lectures.
E-Learning portals with pedagogical elements like video and audio podcasting, virtual classrooms, expert directories and discussions, blogs, and webinar are making the eLearning system dynamic. Graziadei discussed about the dynamic and static e-learning systems and their assessment techniques and involved in developing of a e-learning portal supporting Course Management System with 4 phase strategy approach.
Asynchronous Learning (Static Web Page Creation or retrieving the data from Database).
Asynchronous Learning and Synchronous Learning with Teleconference facility.
Asynchronous Learning and Synchronous Learning with Desktop Video Conference.
Asynchronous Learning and Synchronous Learning with classroom Video Conference.
This type of Synchronous type of e-Learning systems are helped in development of the another learning technology called M-Learning (Mobile Learning). These M-Learning technologies were started in the 1990’s by the Palm OS makers by releasing courses on CCNA etc. And these are fixed for particular platform or for particular network because of the strength of broadcasting of the data and other aspects but with the current usage of Mobile devices with greater processing speed and the internet technologies M-Learning is widely being used.
For the development of this e-learning portal basic CMS criteria’s
Web based
Platform independent.
Modularity
Easy to maintain and use
Content and Resource Management System
Supporting different Course Formats.
These Course Formats are used for the reusability of the courses information. For the same propose different standard XML and metadata formats are used like SCORM and LAMS learning objects are used. SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) was introduced by the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative to meet the requirements like reusable, interoperable of the CMS.
Example:-
ADL SCORM
1.2
imslrm.xml
Title 1
-
Home
To meet all this challenge, standards and goals of e-learning systems different e-learning tools were developed like Topclass, moodle. Among them provided the most of the features of the e-learning features along with advantages of easy modularity, scalable and open source. Moodle is open source, platform independent front developed in PHP, Ajax and Java Script and backend was developed using the MYSQL database.
Moodle provides standard API for building new modules and administrative blocks for administrating and interactive sessions for sharing and presenting the material related to courses. Moodle provides three types of privileged users.
Administrator
Teacher
Student.
And along with these fixed privileges administrator can change or fix the roles of the user to enhance the role play of the user. For example a teacher can be made as a Dean and can be assigned a task of controlling the lectures, fixing assessment techniques and standards and can also certify the students. Moodle provides different types of course formats like
Weekly Format
Topic Format
SCORM Format
LAMS Format
These formats are used based upon type of the course like Weekly format can be used for distance education course running in fixed time. Even students can suggest the administrator to create new courses. Created course can be maintained by grouping the related course into categories or creating the meta-courses for the existing courses. Using moodle course can be enrolled based upon fixed key or by using pay pal method of enrolling the course by paying money. By this feature moodle can be used for the commercial training purposes also.
The main advantage of the moodle is easy of moodle building. They are two types of modules or plug-ins for moodle
Blocks:-
Blocks are the administrative modules which are visible to the administrators and the teachers to enhance the features and appearance of the moodle.
Example: - Adding new Wiki page to Course.
Activities:-
Activities are the modules which are the interactive sessions or resource sharing activities of the moodle with students by the administrators or the teachers.
Example: - Video Conference session with the students about course topic.
4.1 Directory Structure of Moodle:-
Moodle is developed in PHP so the change in file is displayed after the refresh of the page. In the root directory of the moodle Config.php exists with the global parameters like CFG, THEME which are common and required by all the pages.
Taking this advantage new plug-ins or blocks is added into the blocks and mod folders and changes will be automatically displayed by installing the database. These modules can be controlled by the administrator by deleting, editing and configuring. Each moodle block should follow specified naming and files convections’.
Each moodle block should be in a folder with name of the block and containing the file with the name block_.php.
block_.php should contain a class block_ extending class block_base or block_list. To display the basic block display get_content function should be overridden.
For the global configuration of the block config_global.html file should be created with configuration parameters taking storing the mdl_block database table.
For the action and insertion of the data into the database a form page is created with a class name _form.php containing _form extending the class moodleform with function overriding definition to display the basic forms of the web pages using the API of the moodle.
Similarly for the module plug-in development also uses some naming and file conventions for the development of new module. This is module folder should be placed in the mod folder of the moodle root directory with following files
The total moodle display is controlled by the view.php files in each respective folders of the moodle root directory.
4.2 Plug-ins and Third Party Tools:-
To make moodle more powerful and pedagogically effective e-learning portal moodle require modules should be developed using the third party clients or by basic implementation.
Learn on Demand:-
Red5 Flash Streaming Server:- Red5 flash streaming server is developed in java and flash can be integrated with the moodle.
Moodle Podcasting Plug-in :- this moodle can and an item of audio files and can podcasted using RSS feeds or the iTunes podcasting feeds.
Learn in Real Time:-
Dimdim server:- It is web conferencing, whiteboard ,chatting and desktop sharing open source software developed using Red5 server for the streaming purpose of the data. It is developed in J2EE.
Skype Based Whiteboard:- Skype should be installed and a Skype web browser plug-in should be installed in order to provide the services of the Skype.
Expert Directories:- These Expert directories can be created by creating new module in the moodle using Moodle API.
Open Office:- Open Office was complete developed in Java and it is open source. Using Open Office library and Basic moodle resource management can build sharing and creation of documents.
LinkedIn & Facebook:- Hi5 Rest API and Facebook callback API provides the FOAF(Friend of a Friend) profiles of users through which one can get the social connected people information for inviting friends and other interests of the users.
Productive Tools:-
Mind Maps:- Using the Mind maps one create the interactive designing of the ideas of the individual courses to form a new idea by integrating them and also when designing any brainstorming it can be used for the productiveness in the learning process.
Book Search :- Google book and Amazon book search api are useful for the preview and for the online streaming of the eBooks for the reference of the books
Assessment:-
Quiz and Discussion boards:- Supports many types of questions like MCQ, short answers, matching etc. Supports password protection for the quiz and even questions based on image and Forums for the Pre-Quiz and Post-Quiz.
5. Plan of Work
Bizkul e-learning portal can be built by enhancing the features, functionalities and look and feel of the moodle e-learning portal using Moodle API and third party libraries or software to integrate with the moodle.
5.1 Requirements of Bizkul e-Learning portal are
Learn on-Demand Learn in Real Time Learn Through Collaboration Productive Tools Assessment Podcast Virtual Classroom / workshops Wikis Moderated discussions
Mind mapping (at a glance, summary) Quiz Simulation Whiteboard Document creation & sharing Search Pre-Quiz Resources (research and other material) Synchronized Slides Blogs / micro blogs Pre-Quiz Web meeting Presentation creation & sharing - Slide share Chat Video creation & sharing - YouTube e-Mentoring Social media - LinkedIn/Facebook Expert Directories RSS - access to subscription content through email, web, mobile e-mail / mailing list manager (mailman) 5.2 Work done and Flow of work
Basically these features are divided into three types.
Blocks
Modules or Plug-ins
Display Settings
The blocks and modules building are done using moodle API but to change display settings we have to change the moodle basic library functions and view.php file in course directory inside the root directory in order to change the settings of the display in every page. In order to do the settings the moodle requires apache http server for hosting with the permission for reading and writing the data on the moodledata directory and along with this it requires the changes in php.ini file for the support of the PHP and MYSQL. This moodle even supports the courses that are hosted on the external server and which can be displayed by accessing or redirecting the page to the respective courses.
For maintaining the versioning and for the backup of the moodle codebase SVN is setup. The basic parts of moodle which are missing and changes of the code are identified while committing the SVN which will be helpful for the versioning and releasing the Bizkul.
Basically Bizkul course portal is having the weekly, topic and SCROM formats but missing the information field about the introduction of the course which can be extracted and displayed in the information field of each course. This module was successfully completed and integrated with the existing moodle course formats by taking and displaying the existing WIKIS as information about the course.
Social media - LinkedIn/Facebook API’s are used to extract the information about the registered user and can invite or can update the information about the User which uses the FOAF profile of the users and also uses other semantic web concepts like mind maps.
For the creation of the course and other activities SCORM format is a basic standard given by ADL but SCORM is XML format of metadata about the data. The integration of the SCORM format’s editor with the moodle enhances easy of creation of course by the teacher.
6. References
[1] Introduction to E-Learning “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_learning”
[2] Introduction to Pedagogical “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_learning#Pedagogical_elements”
[3] SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORM”
[4] “Building Asynchronous and Synchronous Teaching-Learning Environments” by William D. Graziadei, Sharon Gallagher, Ronald N. Brown, Joseph Sasiadek in 1997
[5] Introduction to M-Learning “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_learning”
[6] Official Moodle Site “moodle.org”
[7] Moodle API “http://xref.moodle.org”
[8] Official DIMDIM site “http://dimdim.com”
[9] HI5 API “http://api.hi5.com/”
[10] Facebook API “developers.facebook.com”
Comments:-
Ramprasad NNR:
Bizkul- Triage e-Learning Portal
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