A COMPREHENSIVE MIS EXTENSION FOR MOODLE FOR OPENARC SCHOOL OF BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY LTD.

Abstract

OpenArc School of Business and technology Ltd. manages a virtual learning environment which is based on Moodle. Currently they are offering online learning programmes to more than 200 students distributed all over Sri Lanka. However due to limitations in the Moodle system, they are facing difficulties when various MIS reports are requires from the system. Therefore, it was decided, with the guidance of OpenArc School of Business and Technology, to develop an extension/plug-in that would incorporate some of the missing features to Moodle which would benefit the whole e-learning community. The requirements of the system are divided into five functional areas which are, tracking the progress of the students within the learning environment, monitoring the activity of the students, managing custom marks criteria for the learning activities, defining and managing combined courses/programs and providing additional management information on students. The system will be developed as five subsystems covering the five functional areas discussed above. A new set of interfaces will be added to the existing system to access the new system and its features. This dissertation will discuss all the aspects of the system describing the development process in detail. Object oriented methods will be used to design and develop the system. It will be developed using PHP with MySQL for the database system. Evolutionary prototyping method will be used as the development and evaluation method. The extension will run alongside the current system and provide the functions that are specified in the requirements.