Virtual Learning Environment for ‘Technology enhanced classrooms’ in Ladies’ College Colombo 7

Abstract

The purpose of the developed web application is to establish a platform for education in order to integrate learning experiences in an advanced and innovative way where students have access to learning material from any part of the world. It opens up a well-equipped educational repository for transparent communication between all parties of the school such as students, management, teachers, and parents to enhance the respective academic experiences at Ladies College. The goal is to develop a virtual learning environment for the school where the students can engage in retrieving school notes, study materials online and engage in assignments and educational tasks online, whilst the parents also can view the assignment marks and grades as the teachers input their comments and results. In today’s world, digital instrumentation arranges for universal and instant access to limitless intelligence and study materials, thus making a change in schools and education In 2018 Ladies College, the intended client of this application launched smart classrooms inclusive of interactive digital boards for the entire school. Since the school currently does not use a virtual learning environment and the resources and study material shared via the interactive boards cannot be stored in a centralized location for the students to access anywhere and at any time, it can be a wastage of resources. This led to the requirement of developing a virtual learning environment for the technology-enhanced classrooms at Ladies’ College. The developed system is an online platform that offers students and teachers digital solutions and has successfully achieved all objectives. The client end of the architecture in the VLE application developed is an Angular 8 application that communicates with the system user and makes backend API calls. Node JS backend framework was used to develop the server end and Firebase as database. In order to evaluate the system a planned quality assurance process was used. The VLE application which was proposed and developed has been gainfully implemented at Ladies’ College. The application was implemented to be transferable; it can be simply deployed in any classroom/school.