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Grading System, Web Portals, and Learning Management Systems A draft on my interpretations of what I am doingOzgur Balsoy June 11, 2000 A
learning management system is an application which provides lecturers and learners a common environment to save time and resources for duties "involved in assessment, monitoring, recording, and analysis of the learning
process." When developed for online community, LMSs perfectly improve their effectiveness. Grading System (GS) we have been developing can be developed into a more comprehensive LMS by extending its capabilities. Web
portals will gain more attraction and usage as the number of online users increase as the time people are willing to spend for online searches decrease. In addition to current commercial Web portals, computing and
educational portals which are more specific to their respected topics will be more important for researchers and academia. An educational portal would perfectly fit as an interface for a LMS developed in a multi-tier
Web application environment. For a student, the portal might contain a list of his or her current registered courses, up-to-date announcements (i.e. assignment information, dates for exams and grade postings), the next
topics to be covered, links to discussion areas, mailboxes, calendars, and reminders. As such, links to other online applications for course content development, archives of homework and exam questions and alike can be
on lecturers' portal page. To integrate Grading System with outside world such as to communicate between other applications either portals or LMSs, GS needs interfaces. To a portal, GS could provide a list of courses
a user enrolls, curriculum information, quizzes, assignments, exams, dates and deadlines for homework assignments, grading and statistics, and rosters. Using appropriate standards such as SCORM, IEEE LTSC, IMS LOM, GS
elements could be converted into XML-based learning objects which can be used either for presentations or data exchanges between LMSs. In the above paragraphs, I have tried to elaborate on what I have understood from
talks and papers you have delivered. If this was not what you expected from our drafts, please let me know. This summer I plan to
- install and stabilize GS at CSIT's infrastructure,
- study and learn related standards and models,
- implement necessary interfaces for GS and test.
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