concoted Subject: Lessons learned & contributions Resent-Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 12:27:15 -0400 Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox Resent-To: Geoffrey Fox Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2000 17:11:45 -0400 From: Mehmet SEN To: Geoffrey Fox CC: msen@ecs.syr.edu Dear Sir, I wrote some lessons and contribution ideas. Please consider this as a half work and comment on it. (I could not sleep last night because of a machine noise from downstairs, which lasted all the night) Well decision on this part will highly motivate me. Thank you very much mehmet ======================================================== Lessons learned from our research. Recent technologies are adapted in many academic courses to enhance the learning experience. Many tools are provided to enhance Web based distance education. We provided more methodological scientific approach based on our architecture view of all the components useful in education. We designed modular object web approach in a multi-tier perspective for distributed distance education objects. Our architecture provides asynchronous distance education. Our work is used to support synchronous collaboration and content management in distance education. Our contribution is in the integration of modular objects at the back-end with the middle tier services and flexible display interfaces at the front end. We have integrated the following objects in the architecture: Learner objects: Course Objects: Performance Objects: Assignment Objects: Quiz Objects: Supervisor Objects: Assessment Objects: Middle tier provided the services below: High level services: Asynchronous collaboration between learner and supervisors Information Access for learners, supervisors Exam Services Integrated assessment services: Assessment services may be used to support both content assessment and learner assessment, and system assessment. Performance services System performance management Low level services: provides various statistics and representation of background data. Connects with legacy systems Allow customization of system components like changing databases, legacy systems, back-tier applications, etc. ... Customizable user interface: We experimented different user interfaces for easy customizations. Interface customizations are as easy as HTML editing. (One another option is to customize XSL template files.) A secure presentation over a secure channel was always an important issue. The middle tier object providers designed to produce objects in well understood formats like XML, or DOM trees through robust technologies including secure http protocol for easy collaboration with any other system or to allow linkage as a component of interested system. We experimented different technologies to implement our architecture. The final system is a reliable, easy to customizable component within distributed education arena. Our architecture is easy to multi-tier architecture. The architecture model is applicable to many other areas like e-commerce. Any application targeting to connect back-end databases into web browsers may find our approach useful. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Name: Lessons.doc Lessons.doc Type: Microsoft Word Document (application/msword) Encoding: base64