Online Courses for a U.S. Educational Institution

One of the US-based educational facilities decided to expand their services and offer online educational courses for their students. They had a legacy application developed by programmers of a local university a number of years ago and requested Iflexion to fix its defects and add some new features.

Having analyzed the existing program with the outdated user interface, poor functionality and inability to support a large number of users, our experts came up with a proposal to replace it with a brand new solution.

• Presentation Tool allows a tutor/teacher to create HTML-based educational presentations that comprise two kinds of materials: explanations and interactive tests. Presentation materials can include text, images, and sound files. The presentations can be exported either into HTML files viewed offline, or can be deployed to the main suite with online access for students.
• Communication Tools (Learning Chat Rooms, Message Box) enable users to post and discuss educational questions in a real-time mode. Tutors can send mail, including mass mail to all students at once.
• Educational Features (Course Modules, Learning Oriented Maps (LOMs), Content Pages) enable tutors to visualize material and make the learning process interesting and easy. They can create and fill in online educational modules with test questions; upload ad hoc educational maps with glossaries, terms and learning questions; and import converted .doc, .pdf and .ppt files.
• Tracking and Analysis Tools (Grade Tracking System, Course Statistics and Analysis) display all modules, tests, LOMs, and Paper Tests students have taken. They are represented by tables, charts and diagrams. Thus one can see how students’ grades change within a certain time period and identify problems. The tutor can see the status of the assignments (Non-Started, In Progress, Finished, and Non-Scored) and reset scores.
• eMom Module allows tracking students’ success through an advanced grade tracking and reporting system that alerts tutors about low scores or missed e-tests to draw their attention so that students do not fail the course. It includes a number of surveys that help to establish effective communication with these students, find out what kind of problems they have and adjust their schedule if needed.
• Auxiliary system tools (File Converter and Log Files) facilitate the use of the system and provide capability to analyze user behavior. Tutors can convert .doc, .pdf and .ppt files into html pages with different types of content (text, images, and terminology), which can be further uploaded to the application, as well as track students’ activities, which are logged to a relevant file. The system also logs tutors’ activities (available for system administrators).

The Online Courses is a web-based application supporting different browsers. Its architecture is based on a three-layer framework, which uses customizable JSP Tag Libraries for the presentation layer, Java and Servlet API classes for business logic, file system and MySQL for content and data storage. The implemented framework is already reused in other web-based Java applications, which proves its scalability and lower cost of integration.