EARL - Virtual Learning Environment

Date: September, 2004 - June, 2006

Proposed By: Graham Sander, M Sohail (Civil & Building Engineering)

Staff Contacts: Melanie King, Paul Newman

Link: http://earl.lboro.ac.uk/

  
 
This continuing project is based on two advisory board proposals which were accepted in November 2003. The main requirements for these projects were:

‘Communications Module’ - Civil & Building Engineering

  • 3 academics needed to have access to the module resources website so they could update it and make contributions. However, they were worried about version control of the resources and pages.
  • They needed to put their resources into some kind of ‘to do’ order but did not have the final resources or schedule. The final edits would need to be altered at the very last minute.
  • They wanted to include lots of formative testing (with feedback) which was quick and easy to include and update.
  • The module was almost completely flexible learning, so they needed some way of making sure the students were going through the resources and the tutorial questions.

‘ WEDC - Distance Learning Short course students’

  • They needed a registration process for short course students which meant that the short course people could be easily registered with them but not go through the university registration system and also those student just had access to the WEDC short course material and nothing else.
  • They wanted the ability to have grouped discussions within a course,
  • They wanted somewhere that students could upload work and have this available for all students to access.
  • They wanted the possibility of having a multi-language course structure.

For both of these briefs, a new OPEN SOURCE 'course management system' has been customised to resolve all the requirements that these two projects need. EARL (Engineering ARena for Learning) is based upon 'claroline' (http://www.claroline.net) and is currenlty being customised and tested for these modules.

It is hoped that more modules can be piloted on the system in the next academic year so that proper evaluation studies can be made on it's use and effectiveness.


Flexible Learning 'Communications' module project:
Dr Marie Bassford

WEDC 'short course' DL project:
Melanie Bates