CONTENT DEVELOPER A WEB BASED CONTENT DEVELOPMENT TOOL FOR OPENARC SCHOOL OF BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY LTD.

Abstract

Distance education has seen a sudden boom in the Sri Lankan education arena for the past few years. Learning Management Systems, most commonly referred to as LMS s, are gaining popularity with each passing day. With the new found freedom, brought about by the ending of the civil war, there is a vast amount of infrastructural development going on in the previously uncharted areas. This will open up new avenues for educational institutes that use distant education as a medium. But this is just a piece of the cake, with distance learning, students from all over the world can enrol themselves into a course offered by tutors who are situated in another part of the world. The OpenArc School of Business and Technology, is one such educational institute that has been in the forefront of the Sri Lankan distance learning movement. Having an excellent record in face-to-face education, OpenArc School is ranked as one of the best Online Education Service providers in Sri Lanka. The presented system, provides means of creating, predefined interactive SCORM compatible activities, which can easily be incorporated in to any LMS. Activities created through the system can be downloaded, edited or saved for later use. The system also provides means for reporting errors in activities and discussion forums through which users may communicate with each other. The initial design for the system was created using UML (Unified Modelling Language). The system was developed using the evolutionary prototyping system development methodology. Flash CS4 with ActionScript 3.0 was used to develop the activities, while J2EE technologies were used to implement the web application with the use of Eclipse Galileo IDE. The database requirement of the system is fulfilled by MySQL 5.1.