Course Management: A complete asynchronous environment in education

Abstract

Technological improvements enhanced our education experience and involved
new terms like distance-learning. Todays education systems are need to be
supported by new architectures managing course, instructor, student, and
performance records, assignment submission, statistic data collection,
assessment, security issues. We have developed a multi-tier architecture
integrating back-end tools and systems with commodity interfaces. We
implemented an asynchronous open information access environment. The
resulting environment evolved with the needs, and reached a large audience,
more than 400 users, including in-campus and online distance courses. This
paper presents a technical overview of the architecture and discusses its
functionalities gained from the experience.

  1. Introduction

We developed a distributed-open asynchronous information access environment
where users access from different locations through a complete security
mechanism and user authentication interface integrated to commodity
interfaces. The environment provides asynchronous collaboration of
supervisors, instructor, co-instructors, TA, students, guests , and
administrators through the Web Browsers. Distributed students can on-line
register for the courses and get services like passwords assignments, post
office & atomized mail lists, file uploading, pictured class lists, surveys,
grades, evaluations, performance assessment, and other account
administration. The student records and their performance records are
planned to be kept in a database continuously that provides a base for a
virtual university student services. Students performance pages includes
their grades, grader comments, averages, expected grades, failures and
suggestions, etc. A student can access his performance page, at any time
from any where having web access; can include his resume at job applications
for more reliable evaluations.

Besides convenience at online grading and submitting the grades to the
students, instructors use the environment as technical services provider at
the course preparation and as an assessment tool during the semester, or
later as a long-term reference. The graders can see various statistics about
the students at any time while grading from a web browser. A categorized
questionnaire database is useful for online surveys and quizzes. Preparing
class surveys provides keep tracking of the student progress, understanding
course quality, and increased adaptability to the student needs. Possible
customizations of grades brings more flexibilities while grading.

The environment also presents an user friendly administration interface on
the web. A server administrator can tune up the performance and change the
configuration from any web-browser connected to the Internet network.

Our architecture considered a broad perception of an educational
environment. Similar feature subsets exists in other course management
systems such as WebCT [WebCT]. The architecture of WebCT is based solely on
the Web Server and file system. While this is suitable for many situations
our architectural design is driven by the need to incorporate commodity
databases like in PAPI [PAPI] specifications on data interchange formats,
and other advanced web systems used by our professors in developing course
materials like WebWisdomNT[].

2. Basic Needs and Problems encountered leading to the project;

With our experience we realized that especially the outside distributed
students had lived difficulties to follow a course presented with recent web
technologies. Many students thousands miles away from our teaching center
had frustrated to have offerings in-campus students had. A new complete
integrated environment need to be presented to the outside registered
students to make them feel like living in a virtual university. Even the
in-campus students having many asynchronous resources around craved such an
environment. Not having the student records in a trustable, easily-securely
accessible database environment is a complete disadvantage for both on and
off-campus students. Specific web-based interfaces should allow users to
access certain information,perform related operations, and store the results
in a state-full environment.

The team offering the courses became loaded immediately by the work of
technical class preparation. Construction of class lists, email lists,
making Unix accounts, listing student home pages, submitting passwords to
students and keeping track with add-drop students, measuring class level
with surveys for different types of courses needed many human-effort because
of lacking an atomized environment. The issues like grading became problem
in distributed collaborative education cases with respectful number of
teaching team in charge. Furthermore, online progress tracking, having a
categorized questionnaire databank, automatically evaluation reports ,and
similar services became a need more than a luxury by the time.

3. Features

We designed the student records specifically to offer the following
functionalities through the Web;
http://carver.npac.syr.edu:3768/users-docs/msen7/paper/userstudentmenus.gif

3.1 Course Records Manipulations

One can see the courses listed to make operations like browse, update,
delete, on the present courses, or new courses can be added. Instructors can
prepare surveys to be filled by on-line registering students.

3.2 Student Records Manipulations & Students' own account administration

Staff users can see the students registered in a specific course listed. One
can create new students optional to students' own online-registration,
browse, update, remove a student. Students themselves has private accounts
with enhanced tools for their personal use, which they get by online
registering to the courses. They can always see their performance records,
use post office, upload homework files, administrator their virtual
directories and personal accounts.

3.3 Assignments & Grading

The team offering courses to students can make new assignments through the
web interfaces and specify grading information about the assignments like
percentage, published URLs, etc.

The on-line grading provides an asynchronous collaboration between
distributed staff team members hided from the online students. Students may
see their grades online, securely and privately after they are published by
graders. The grading interface contains different information and comments
depending on the security level of accessing person; grader, students,
assistants, instructors, supervisors, parents, etc. The grader may use
various interfaces, has different grading alternatives, e.g., numeric,
countless customized word grades, etc., and feedback information while
grading, e.g., averages, ranks, etc.
http://carver.npac.syr.edu:3768/users-docs/msen7/paper/grading.gif

3.4 File Manager

NPAC Virtual File Manager is integrated in the environment for uploading
homework files into virtual directories in server side, and directory-file
manipulations.
http://carver.npac.syr.edu:3768/users-docs/msen7/paper/filemanager.gif

3.5 Surveys & Quizzes

Through the web interfaces, instructors can prepare surveys & quizzes for
students at any time the course offered. A categorized question bank keeped
in the database to select previous questions. Questions may be distributed
into different categories, and presented in a logical way to the students
independent of their preparation at different times. Beyond the regular
quizzes, different aspects of quizzes from student-self evaluation quizzes
to pop-quizzes in class time are currently in progress. The survey results
are automatically evaluated and immediately presented to supervisors on
their browsers. By using the surveys and quizzes the understanding level and
expectations of the class may be measured, and the performance of the class
can be leveraged.
http://carver.npac.syr.edu:3768/users-docs/msen7/paper/surveyresult.gif

3.6 User records

Additional to the student users, a different kind of the user accounts are
kept in the system for instructors, co-instructors, supervisors, super
users, TAs, graders, administrators, browsers, other system administrators,
etc. These records contains personal information about the users and their
access privileges. The security issues about different level of users will
be discussed later.

3.7 Services and legacy systems connections

One of the important characteristics of the projects is that it contains
many services atomized in its environment. The load of the staff offering
courses in NPAC relieved considerably. Besides these atomization jobs, there
are other services directly offered in the environment like its own
post-office categorizing email lists. Administrators can do performance
tuning and configuration changes from an easy-front-end interface. The
access logs are kept for future references and assessment.

3.8 Security Issues

The student records are one of the most private information in education.
Because of its exposure to the public over the Internet, the whole
environment is subject to attacks to capture, to alter, to destroy the
private information. For the sake of completeness, complete security should
be inserted into the architecture. We solved the security issues under the
following categories;
http://carver.npac.syr.edu:3768/users-docs/msen7/paper/security.gif

Communication channel security: Currently, we have the technology to secure
enough the communication channels over a public network. Using public key
cryptography in the SSL protocol secures the transferring of the information
over the Internet.

User authentication: Like many computer operating systems a user
authenticates himself by entering a user login id and a secret password
known solely to himself and the system.

User access lists: The second part of the authentication mechanism is
keeping access lists for the users. All the users are restricted only to
access to the allowed part of the database, HTML pages. Access lists can be
easily manipulated in the user records interface, simply by carrying present
course names to the access list box.

User privilege levels: Since privacy issues are most important in such a
system, user password authentication and access lists are not enough to keep
privacy by themselves. After those steps, a user must have powerful enough
privileges to access, delete, update some records, or to see HTML
information pages.

Presentation security: One of the challenging issues in the security is not
the communication security but the keeping privacy after data transfered. It
is highly possible that students may see their grades and other private
records in a public cluster. Although it is not possible to provide complete
security at this level, we improved different strategies to make the risk as
low as possible; SSL server prevents browser caching in general, timeout
clocks destroy the windows, the new unique id given by each login, with
expiration time, prevents using same URL and stealing passwords, etc.

3.9 HTML Editable User Interfaces in template library

All the user interfaces are presented through the WEB browsers, and they
also keeped as HTML-like files in a template library separated from the
implementation and the database records. One can easily edit user interfaces
as HTML files without any technical knowledge of the environment. Also using
various style sheets for different users is possible.

3.10 Easy system administration

A front end menu is prepared for the administrators, who are configuring the
connections like, JDBC-Database connectivity, and tuning up the performance,
etc. Any third party, who wants to use the project for themselves, can
easily use the project just by using user friendly front-end guides without
any deep knowledge of components without having highly skilled computer
experts.

4. Architecture and Involved technologies

The entire architecture is implemented based on the concern of usability,
performance, portability and easy installation to any machine in anywhere.
The involved technologies includes HTML, JavaScript, Java, JDBC, SQL, SSL
and limited amount of Perl for specific local legacy systems.
http://carver.npac.syr.edu:3768/users-docs/msen7/paper/architecture.gif

The architecture is a multi-tier architecture. In general it can be seen as
a three-tier architecture. The more layers in middle tier especially
designed in semantics of modularity and easy integration with other related
projects.

The user interface completely presented as an commodity interface. All the
data access, and functionality is managed through the client browsers. The
communication with the outside world is provided through dynamically
produced HTML pages by the servlets. The communication channel is secured
with SSL to complete other inside security mechanisms as previously
mentioned.

In the middle tier, the main intelligence of the environment is placed
hierarchically. The first level contains the high level functionalities to
talk with the clients and to perform the operations in a more advanced level
without considering the low level system dependencies like database
connectivity. The relational database records are considered as the objects
at this level. The second level mainly serves as a cache memory to database
objects. The cache mechanism provided performance increases by decreasing
accesses to the database for each operation. The objects in the cache are
defined as the objects which are keeping single relational database table
row entry and related methods to perform on them. The last level performs
low level operations like connecting to the databases and performing
database related operations. Each independent type of tables like, students,
users, courses, etc., has an associated class. The last layer in the
architecture is database back-end. Since implementation is done with Java,
any suitable database supporting basic SQL standards can be chosen and the
database access can be forwarded to selected database through JDBC bridge
update in the front end options. The parser dynamically produces HTML user
interfaces through the template library storing outside editable HTML-like
files. Finally, the architecture includes the legacy systems through a
cgi-module.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

NPAC's student records database environment has been used by many students,
about 450, and staff up to date in two years. It is evolved with
professional experience and new needs both by on and off campus course
offerings[SC98]. The environment keeps a rich set of online available tools
useful in education. Distributed students from Missisipi, Boston, X, and
Syracuse online registered for the same course offerings in the environment.

The implementation is entirely written in Java in a portable fashion.
Another educational organization also installed it. Its layered and modular
architecture provides easy upgrading and integrability with other
environments, e.g., high level sharing database records. The environment
provides easy server administration and configuration through the Web
additional to its convenience for users.

Currently we are developing new assessment tools having a new horizon using
data mining techniques on combination of environment logs and other
synchronous and asynchronous resources logs. We are planning database
integrations with our other current projects through XML. Using DHTML in
user interfaces is another issue.

6. References

[VPL] K. Dincer and G. C. Fox, Using Java and JavaScript in the Virtual
Programming Lab: A Web-Based Parallel Programming Environment, in
Concurrency: Practice and Experience Journal, June 1997.

[HPDC-6] K. Dincer and G. C. Fox, Design Issues in Building Web-based
Parallel Programming Environments, in Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE
International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-6),
Portland, OR, August 5-8, 1997.

[SC98] David E. Bernholdt, Geoffrey C. Fox, Roman Markowski, Nancy J.
McCracken, Marek Podgorny, Thomas R. Scavo Syracuse University | Debasis
Mitra and Qutaibah Malluhi, Jackson State University, Synchronous Learning
at a Distance: Experiences with TANGO, SC 1998.

[WebCT] Murray W. Goldberg and Sasan Salari, "An Update on WebCT
(World-Wide-WebCourse Tools) - a Tool for the Creation of Sophisticated
Web-Based Learning Environments", Proceedings of NAUWeb '97 - Current
Practices in Web-Based Course Development, June 12 - 15, 1997, Flagstaff,
Arizona.

[PAPI] Frank Farance (edutool.com), James Schoening (US Army),Public and
Private Information (PAPI) Specification,
http://www.edutool.com/papi/papi-500.html