PLATO- PLATFORM FOR LEARNING AND TEACHING ONLINE

Abstract

It is common that each course at a university has its own web site for managing course materials and communicating with students. However, the people, mainly instructors, who develop the course web site, tend to provide different interfaces and functions depending on their needs and web development skill. The Platform for Learning and Teaching Online (PLATO) is an online course management system, which aims at providing a uniform interface and hands-on functions for constructing various course web sites in a simple and customizable manner. 1. Overview Nowadays, it is commonly expected that courses and lectures offer a web site which serves as central information-hub for collecting, disseminating, and managing course related information. This does not stop at universities, but will likely proliferate across all institutions of learning. Moreover, with the rise and the wide accessibility of sophisticated web development tools, the functionality such web sites offer, will likely increase, and with this increase, will the expectation of their users.