WebCT is a virtual learning environment, developed by Murray W. Goldberg in 1996 at the University of British Columbia[38][37]. It is of particular note as it was the original VLE used at the University of St Andrews[131] for delivery of course content.
WebCT provided a variety of tools, including:
Announcements Sends announcements of course-related events to students and staff.
Assignments Provides details of assignments to students, and provides both space for
them to submit coursework to, and to hold marks for that coursework.
Calendar Provides a calendar of events, handling both as shared events for an entire
course, and an individual user.
Chat and Whiteboard Provides for users with a method for synchronous communication
(chat room), as well as a whiteboard for sharing visual data such as slides.
Course Content Stores course content in a file-system structure, ready for access by stu-
dents. Course content can also be played back from SCORM modules.
Discussion Provides for asynchronous communication about a course, as well as assign-
ment of marks to conversations.
HTML Creator A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor, allowing
non-technical users to compose HTML pages without requiring them to learn HTML first.
Learning Modules Sequences course components, such as content, assessments, assign-
ments, media library components, SCORM modules, chat rooms, etc. to provide a learning path for students to follow.
10
http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Learn/Products/Blackboard-Learn/
Mail Provides a secure e-mail facility for students and staff to communicate privately with each other. However e-mail can only be received from other users of the system.
Media Library The Media Library is a collection of pictures, video files, audio files
and/or glossary entries.
Quizzes WebCT provides for a wide variety of different tests to be administered to stu-
dents, to evaluate how well they have understood course material. Some of these tests can be automatically marked (multiple choice, calculated, fill in the blank) while others are manually marked by course staff (paragraph/essay-style).
Self Tests Similar to quizzes, except intended to allows students to assess their own knowl-
edge of course material, rather than for assessment by teaching staff.
Surveys Provides a way of gathering feedback about the course, in an anonymous manner,
using a series of staff-defined questions.
2.1.6
Bodington
Bodington was originally developed by the University of Leeds. It proceeded to expand to a number of other institutions including the University of Oxford, University of Manchester, University of York, UHI Millennium Institute and Eton College.
As of release 2.6.0 Bodington provided a substantial set of course management features:
Group communication room A discussion space similar to TAGS’ notebook service
Logbook For students for keep notes on their coursework
Content management For course content
Questionnaire For performing surveys of the user base
Simple tests With options for either automatic or manual marking
These features are however all intended for use in assisting learning, and are student- focused rather than administrative.
Note that the last released version as of the time of writing is 2.8.011, however documen- tation is difficult to acquire due to the main project website no longer being available, and therefore a historical list has been used.
2.2
Other Software
2.2.1
BOSS
BOSS12(BOSS Online Submission System) is a coursework submission and marking tool
developed at the University of Warwick[60]. Unusually for the software systems detailed here it focuses on providing a single service, namely electronic submission of coursework, and assessment of that coursework. The functionality it provides is similar to that of the coursework submission tool included in MMS, although BOSS expands upon that func- tionality by providing tools for automatic marking of coursework. However BOSS appears to lack integration with central student records.
Evaluation of the BOSS system has shown the use of electronic mark sheets as an effective tool in reducing time taken for marking[61], supporting the theory that web applications can reduce time taken in other administrative tasks.
From a technical point of view it is also interesting in that BOSS has support for alterna- tive user interfaces – as well as a web interface, it comes with more traditional desktop application clients for students and staff. It does this by splitting the application into two parts, a core ”engine” and the user interface, which communicate using Java remote method invocation (RMI).
11http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodington/files/bodington/2.8.0/ - ac-
cessed 14th May 2013
12
2.2.2
Mobile Applications
Mobile applications targeting higher education environments frequently include function- ality for delivering academic-related data to students. Examples include campusM13from oMbiel, u360 Mobile14from Straxis Technology and uMobile15from Jasig.
While there are no generally available mobile applications for MMS, a number of different applications have been prototyped[73][125]. Please note that web applications with an al- ternative rendering specifically for mobile platforms are not covered in this section, instead this only addresses “native” applications.
Stand-alone Mobile Applications
Stand-alone applications such as campusM and u360 Mobile (targeting the UK and US higher education markets respectively) have the advantage that they do not require the in- stitution to have a specific software package (such as Moodle, Blackboard Learn or uPortal) to use, however they also require more work to integrate with such platforms (if even pos- sible) and institutional data sources.
The majority of the functionality presented by these applications closely reflects content directly available from an institutional website, such as a staff directory, library catalogue search, news feeds, calendar of events, course catalogue, etc. Where they do provide func- tionality that does depend on or integrate well with mobile platforms such as campus maps and alert (push) messaging, this functionality does not overlap with functionality provided by MMS.
By comparison mobile application prototypes for MMS have focused on dealing with time and/or location sensitive information such as grades received, tutorial group signup and attendance monitoring.
13http://www.campusm.com/- accessed 11th June 2013
14http://www.u360mobile.com/- accessed 11th June 2013
Integrated Mobile Applications
Mobile applications which integrate with a specific piece of software have the advantage of a data service whose development is interwoven with that of the application. The parent application is likely to already be installed and well established at the institution, mean- ing that data quality and availability are much less likely to be problems. However, this also inherently makes these applications inflexible, dependent on functionality of their host application.
uMobile, which integrates with the uPortal portal platform, is based on the Appcelera- tor Titanium SDK16. This provides a flexible and powerful framework, including mobile- orientated functionality such as maps, location and push notifications, however its included default features (calendar, news, video, staff directory, search and maps) do not overlap with MMS.
Moodle Mobile17 is based on the Phonegap framework18, although an earlier version was a “native” iOS application. It provides a mobile-optimised interface to some of Moodle’s functionality, such as course content, or messaging students. The functionality is teaching- centric, and has limited overlap with MMS (for example it does allow access to course content, but doesn’t appear to provide grade data).
2.2.3
SITS
The SITS:Vision student and course management system, developed by Tribal, is one of the most popular student management systems in the UK, and is the system of choice at the University of St Andrews. The data it manages overlaps heavily with the data maintained within MMS, including student and staff details, taught modules, module enrolments, stu- dents’ final grades from modules, etc. There are significant data elements it stores which MMS does not, such as degree courses, and details of potential students, as well as ele- ments that it could store but does not at St Andrews, such as marks or grades for individual items of assessed work.
16http://docs.appcelerator.com/titanium/latest/- accessed 22nd February 2015
17
http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_Mobile- accessed 15th July 2013
Figure 2.2: Screenshot of e-Vision
Unlike MMS, it is a desktop application intended primarily for use by expert users. It has a web portal interface, e-Vision (shown in figure 2.2), designed for a more general user-base, however the workflows presented by e-Vision are generally constrained by the underlying data structures. For example users can generally edit a single record at a time, and workflow during editing is tightly controlled (note instructions not to refresh or use the back button, in the screenshot).
The underlying data architecture of SITS:Vision is intended to be database agnostic, such that while it happens to use Oracle as the database engine at St Andrews, virtually any other SQL-based database can be used instead if desired. Unfortunately it also fails to use many core database features, for example foreign key constraints on data tables, or primary key generation by the database, leading to unnecessary risk of data corruption. Further, actions such as triggers on data change are managed in the application software rather than the database layer, which mean that other applications cannot safely modify SITS’ data within the underlying database, and essentially duplicates engineering effort in ensuring that triggers are fired correctly every time data changes.
2.2.4
uPortal
uPortal19is interesting as a further example of a web application intended for use in an edu-
cational context, which is not focused on delivery or administration of a course. uPortal is, as the name suggests, a web portal application, which aggregates interfaces and data from a number of sources to provide a central location for students and staff to find webmail, news feeds, calendar, etc.
It is in use at a large number of institutions, including the University of St Andrews, where it provides functionality including matriculation, checking personal details, and links to coursework and modules within both Moodle and MMS.
uPortal has similarities to MMS in that both pull together data from a wide variety of sources, however uPortal takes data which has already been formatted as HTML (through portlets), whereas MMS uses the raw data and handles presentation itself. Here the in- tents are different, and while uPortal is simpler, it lacks the ability to readily mix data sets together (for example merging students on modules with calendars).
2.3
Architecture
While the most obvious aspects of MMS are its end user functionality, its architecture is also key. MMS provides a web application framework, which simplifies development of tools for use in a higher education context. This framework encourages effective design of tools, while providing support for authentication and authorisation. It enables use of a wide variety of institutional data sources and systems, through an abstraction layer which manages much of the complexity for the tool developers.
2.3.1
Model-View-Controller
MMS’ web interface is derived from the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern[65], which it encourages in its hosted tools through provision of a data model, and easy tools for sep- arating the controller and view. The main modification to the MVC model as implemented
in MMS is the addition of a layer which handles security, particularly in relation to access controls to entities within MMS (such as modules, course content, students, etc.)
2.3.2
Spring
In the context of Java application architecture, especially MVC web applications, the Spring framework is an obvious comparison. Spring is a framework based around use of aspect-orientated programming (see Kiczales et. al.[64] for an introduction to aspect oriented programming) to modify Java Beans, injecting significant new functionality such as transaction handling, security, web application support, etc.
Like MMS, Spring provides a framework which includes web request dispatching and parsing support, database querying and manipulation utility classes, model-view-controller support, web services, etc. It differs from MMS in that it provides a generic framework, whereas MMS is targeted at dealing with data structures in a higher education institution. Whereas Spring uses aspect-orientated programming to provide much of its functionality, MMS acts as a wrapping layer which directly calls its hosted tools. This approach ensures that flow of control is clearer as it is limited to utilising conventional Java language features, however it does so at the cost of requiring hosted tools to be designed for the framework. In comparison, Spring uses proxy classes to modify behaviour of existing classes, leading to non-obvious flow of control. The number of distinct method calls used by Spring as part of this process also leads to stack traces which have a high proportion of framework lines compared to the hosted application[94], further confusing the process of debugging errors.
2.4
Project Background
The initial design of MMS was formed from experiences with a variety of applications. These applications allowed experimentation with different designs, use cases, development languages etc., and from them the architecture and intent of the first version of MMS was formed.
Of the applications listed below, Tutors and Group Support and Finesse are both still in use in finance education, INSIDE was replaced entirely by MMS, and DIF (which was
actually a sister-project of MMS, not a predecessor and ran from 2004 to 2007) has since been merged into MMS.