Learning Management Systems for Distance Education Over the Internet

Abstract

The Information Age has created an unprecedented demand for learning. In order to
 stay competitive in the workplace, workers find it necessary to continually reeducate
 themselves. The demand to learn and learn quickly is driven by a paradigm shift in
 the business world. The business atmosphere has changed from one where the big
 acquire the small to one where the fast acquire the slow. Seeking education from
 institutions offering traditional classroom courses on fixed timelines is inadequate in
 this environment. Today's learner needs an educational delivery methodology where
 they determine the time and place of the delivery.
 To meet these demands, institutions of higher education are quickly migrating courses
 to the Internet. With the adoption of the Web as a popular standard, this delivery
 methodology shows great promise of being able to deliver educational content to
 students anywhere at anytime. As learners rapidly accept this delivery method,
 institutions are under great pressure to develop and deliver educational content with
 the same high standards as traditional instruction. As a result, specialized software
 systems to support Internet based education have rapidly emerged to help fill this
 need. These Internet based Learning Management Systems (LMS) provide an
 environment where educators can assemble and deliver high quality educational
 content in a virtual classroom.
 With Web based content quickly being created at institutions throughout the world,
 principles, such as content discovery, interface standards, and searchable libraries,
 need to be adapted to make the next generation of LMS more robust. EDUCAUSE
 recognized this need and initiated the Instructional Management Systems (IMS)
 project in 1997. The IMS project is defining interoperability specifications for the
 next generation LMS.
 As LMS become increasingly integrated into the learning environment, they may
 duplicate administrative information found in an institution's enterprise system,
 which are comprised of systems such as Student Information, Training
 Administration, Human Resource Management, Financial Management, and Library
 Management. These systems, representing a major investment for an institution, are
 part of large infrastructures for managing access to electronic resources and are
 considered to be the official source for administrative information.
 Duplication of the same information across different systems is not a desirable
 administrative architecture since it raises costs and the potential for inaccurate data
 increases. It would be desirable to share common data elements as needed through an
 interoperability architecture. This thesis presents an architecture that will allow such
 interoperability and is based on the Enterprise Interoperability Specification of the
 IMS project.

Computer Science