Analiza grafičkih mogućnosti sučelja sustava za e-učenje Omega

D. Boras i S. Matić

Sažetak

MOODLE (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) je modularna objektno orijentirana dinamična okolina za e-učenje. Budući da je to sustav otvorenog koda (open source) dostupan je i besplatan svima. Omega je inačica sustava Moodle na hrvatskom jeziku implementirana na Filozofskom fakultetu u Zagrebu kao sustav za učenje u elektroničkoj okolini, podrazumijevajući učenje na daljinu, kao i računalno potpomognutu nastavu. Za kolegije na Omegi kao paralela analognoj nastavi može biti otvoren i aktiviran tzv. course account te im se može pristupati s aspekta studenta, profesora ili administratora. Grafičke su mogućnosti Omege modularno specifične, što znači da je sučelje za svaki od modula ograničeno određenom vrstom dizajna i formatom sadržaja. Takva platforma ograničava prijenos medijski višesložnih poruka primjerice onih koje objedinjavaju tekst, sliku i animaciju. Kritička analiza grafičkih mogućnosti sučelja Omege ukazuje na potrebu za razvojem složenijih modula opsežnijih mogućnosti prikaza i organizacije sadržaja.

Graphic interface analysis of the E-learning system Omega

D. Boras, S. Matić

Summary

Moodle is an open source modular object oriented dynamic learning environment available and free of charge for everyone. Omega is a Moodle implementation in the Croatian language at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. It functions as an e-learning system both for distance learning and for learning in electronic environment as computer assisted teaching. Courses can have their accounts assigned on the Omega system, and can be accessed by students and professors as well as administrators. Omega graphics are modular specific, meaning that each module has a specifically designed interface for different content formats. Such a platform restricts transfer of multimedia messages consisting of text, pictures and animation. Critical analysis of Omega’s graphic interface suggests the need for development of more advanced modules enabling broader possibilities of presentation and content organisation.

Keywords: CMS, MOODLE, e-learning, distance learning, Internet, online education

1. Introduction
The high student enrollment quota at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Zagreb, puts a great organizational and administrative challenge for its faculty and staff. With the Bologna system being applied to Croatian universities, it is even harder to manage sections enrolling many students. The problem is spatial as well as temporal. Many colleges lack space, counting not even as half rooms necessary for curricula to be held as planned. Therefore, the need for an efficient system is constantly growing. Moodle is a course management system (CMS) in the form of a free, open source software package available to everyone. It allows even non-technical teachers to set up and maintain a Web site where students can log in, access course, view information, interact, share, and teach others. The teachers and administrators open the doors, and the students only have to enter.

2. Moodle and constructivist theory of learning
Moodle [1] is a software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites. It is an ongoing development project designed to support a social constructionist framework of education where the student is put to the center of education a process of acquiring knowledge with teachers and other educators serving only as models and instructors. It is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU Public License). Basically this means that Moodle is copyrighted, but that you have additional freedoms. You are allowed to copy, use and modify Moodle provided that you agree to: provide the source to others, not modify or remove the original license and copyrights and apply this same license to any derivative work. Moodle can be installed on any computer that can run PHP, and can support SQL type database (for example MySQL). It can be run on Windows and Mac operating systems and many flavors of Linux (for example Red Hat or Debian GNU). There are many Moodle Partners to assist you, even host your Moodle site. The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists.
The constructivist theory of learning is based on creativity from the aspect of which the knowledge is formed inside the mind. Therefore the knowledge is not something ready-made, prepared and fixed for the students to acquire. On the contrary, the idea is to create a dynamic learning environment that is electronic, flexible and simple to use for all of its users. The students are not passive recipients of knowledge, but active participants. Furthermore, by being web-based, it is spatially and temporally independent which makes it available to a greater population of students and teachers. The visual design of a Moodle platform is very simplistic, but applicable in order to either provide an alternative educational surrounding or to supplement the traditional existing one, serving as a tool for teacher and student assistance.

3. Moodle Statistics and trial implementation
Moodle statistics show that there are 38078 registered sites using the Moodle platform, with 1685948 course accounts with 1823802 teachers and 16624482 users altogether.
To try building your site from scratch [3]:
1. Open a Web browser.
2. Visit demo.opensourcecms.com/moodle .
3. Click "Login" at the top.
4. Enter "admin" for the username and "demo" as the password.
5. Click "Users," and then, "Add a new user."
6. Fill in the form and click "Save."
7. Add a new user who will be your first mock student.
8. Click "Demo" on the top left-hand side of the page.
9. From the left-hand menu, click "Courses."
10. Add a new category, such as "sports."
11. Click the "Add a new course" button and add a course called "soccer101."
12. Fill in the course information, save changes, and click "continue."
13. Add your username and admin user as "teachers."
14. Click your course name at the top left to go to the home page for that course.
15. Click the button at the top right that says "Turn editing on."
16. Now add content, such as a quiz, Web page, link, forum, or chat.
17. Click "Demo" in the top-left corner to go back to your classroom home page.
18. Click "Users" in the left navigation pane and add a new user called "student".
19. Close your browser, log in as a student, and try taking the quiz or using other content as a student.

4. Omega
Omega is a Moodle implementation in the Croatian language at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Zagreb. It functions as an e-learning system both for distance learning and for learning in electronic environment as computer assisted teaching. Since the idea of distance, web-based education is almost impossible to entirely conduct within the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities having so many department and sections that need to be managed according to the Bologna system as well, our Moodle platform serves basically as a tool assisting the traditional education. Courses can have their accounts assigned on the Omega system, and can be accessed by students and professors as well as administrators. Such a platform restricts transfer of multimedia messages consisting of text, pictures and animation. Critical analysis of Omega's graphic interface suggests the need for development of more advanced modules enabling broader possibilities of presentation and content organization.

5. Omega’s Interface
Omega graphics are modular specific, meaning that each module has a specifically designed interface for different content formats.

Picture 1: initial interface of Omega
Picture 1 illustrates the initial interface of Omega offering clear and unambiguous navigation through different blocks – news block, block with important and useful links, blocks showing active online users, administrator information, calendar and the main block listing all the departments with course accounts.

Pictures 2 and 3: the log-in screen, guest access log-in, enrollment key icon

Special type of log-in enables also external users to log in as guests, not being able to participate in forum discussions, or to modify, but only to view data. This feature builds upon the idea of openness and free distribution of the Moodle platform itself as well as the course data placed on it. This depends on teachers who moderate their course accounts, whether they want to make their courses available to external users or not. Course accounts enabling guest access have a little icon that says “this course enables anonymous log-in”. Furthermore, there is another feature of double protection to limit the log-in rights. For example, all users within a Moodle platform can enroll into any course, unless a teacher moderator decides to require an enrollment key before they log in a specific course. Those teachers that want only a specified group of students to enroll their courses reveal this key only to certain (group of) individuals. However, a course account can both demand the enrollment key and enable guest access at the same time, the difference being only in online participation, disabling guests as external users to participate in forum discussions. Therefore, the guests need not have the enrollment key to enter a course account and view data, only properly enrolled students have to.

Picture 4: after log-in screen for internal users

A user can be enrolled in several courses on a Moodle platform and he or she may not want to scroll through each department’s list of course accounts each time they log in so there is a screen (see Picture 4) that follows after the log-in screen for internal users listing only courses that a student has enrolled, nevertheless what department or section they belong to. This feature saves time and effort in finding a specific course account and makes the log in itself more user friendly.

Pictures 5 (student view) and 6 (moderator view) : A course account interface, Computer Aided Teaching course Academic Year 2006/2007),

Once a user has selected a course he or she wants to view, the main course interface opens and the user’s log-in is registered and visible to anyone online in the same course account. Again, this feature builds upon the constructivist concept of education – issues of privacy are not as important, everybody who is online, is visible to all current users. This is useful for example, if a user logs in and sees what people are online, there is a little chat box that can be used as a communication tool among the students, as well as teachers and administrators. All users have the same rights to a certain point, meaning that teachers can see what is the last time their students logged in, whether they updated their assignments and when, but the students can also see the exact same information on their teacher’s activity. Besides the log-in information, the students can also see what is the last time their teachers updated assignment instructions, or if their teacher posted a feedback on already uploaded student assignments, etc.
Pictures 5 and 6 illustrate a typical course account interface consisting of several different blocks. The main block is in the middle and besides forums on the top, it lists the weekly or topic blocks, depending on the course account setup. The peripheral blocks, i.e. the side blocks, are various and optional. There are for example blocks for activities, administration, course description, calendar, quiz results, assignment feedback, upcoming events, searching engine and similar. The use of these blocks depends on teacher moderators what they want to include, i. e. which types of blocks they want to use depending on the information they want to include, and where they want it to be located.
The lower picture (Picture 6) shows how a course account interface looks like from a moderator point of view. Teacher moderators and administrators have an extra feature they can use - small editing toolbars located next to each block and inside the topic or weekly block enabling all data to be changed, updated, modified or deleted forever. The resources in the blocks are only a preview of the data which is linked to the back-up files that can be neatly organized in files and stored forever. The basic tools in the editing toolbars are the indent tools in the form of arrows enabling moving content vertically and horizontally all around the main interface, the basic editing tool represented by a little icon illustrating a hand holding a pencil, the deletion tool for deleting content and the eye tool for hiding content from the student view if the materials are for example in the process of developing. Likewise, the whole blocks can be temporarily hidden from student view, and revealed when entirely ready for the students to use. Furthermore, in order not to set focus on a certain week, or a topic, a teacher moderator can make only one block visible and available for the students.
The type of content that can be posted to Omega is basically divided into resources and activities, each of which can be added to any weekly or topic main blocks. Moodle implementation specialists can additionally install other engines and modules, such as spelling checker, or for example the Turn-It-In feature for scanning student papers in order to trace plagiarism, etc. Some of the activities that can be included are: forums, chats, quizzes, assignments, dictionaries, lessons, etc. and examples of resources are: text page, web page, link to an uploaded file or external web site, survey, database, etc. Almost every module inside the Omega interface is accompanied by a question mark icon which is linked to a pop-up help window providing information on the purpose of a certain module. This way there is almost nothing latently presented within this panoptical management system that functions as a constructivist educational environment.
Forums within Omega are organized and designed as typical forum panels usually offering two types of forums, one for general information where only administrators and teacher moderators can post information, allowing students only to reply to already posted topics, and a more discussion-oriented one, enabling students to both start new topics and post their answer within existent discussions.

Picture 7: HTML editor

The HTML editor is a basic text and picture editing toolbar offering many options at a glance, but actually having very restrictive options regarding more demanding content presentation, such as combining multimedia. However, it supports additional HTML code, so if a certain option is not present in the HTML editor toolbar, it can be added by assigning formatting tags to for example, text. It is also compatible with related technologies such as CSS, XML and JavaScript. Though there are some different templates, for example font size and headings, the possibilities for reshaping and readjusting content are very basic.

6. Omega - implementation and statistics
There are approximately 30 departments with 300 courses altogether active on Omega. For example, at Department for Information Sciences, almost every course has its Moodle course account on Omega. The result of this Moodle implementation in the Croatian language is the reduction of paper work and student’s perplexity because of the ambiguity regarding their course prerequisites, assignments, and literature. This web-based platform enables students with instant insight into all course requirements. The Bologna system requires the students to fulfill their obligations in a timely manner. The amount of responsibilities this way seems larger, with the obligations more demanding, while they are actually only being more emphasized and separated into smaller units. This approach enables keeping track of students’ work on a regular basis. In the end all chunks are put together, revised and finally summed up to make the final grade. Omega automatically generates quiz results giving a percentage or a number as the final outcome grade, depending on the preferences. Teachers are able to have smaller tests more often without the whole process being time consuming. Teacher moderators can even enable their students to take a test from home by giving them a temporary password to open a test that may be opened and closed at a certain time.

7. Conclusion
Omega proved to be a highly useful content management system applicable to almost any type of course. By not being either spatially or temporally bound, i. e. by being web based, it offers its users an educational electronic environment that is always open for the students to enter. Various types and forms for knowledge presentation make Omega an invaluable tool for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, especially because of the high student enrollment quota. Not only does it reduce the time consuming activities on a regular basis, such as composing quizzes and surveys, printing out materials, handouts and tests, but it only provides space for additional work with either the students with special needs or for advanced students who over exceed the requirements of the standard curricula. However, the constant development of advanced technologies provides more complex multimedia features for data presentation that are not compatible with the such a platform as Omega is, nor can they be included by simple data insertion. The graphic possibilities also have a restrictive effect. A user has to be familiar with HTML code in order to format data additionally, aside the templates the HTML offers. Furthermore, the whole interface lacks interactivity. If a user makes a wrong move, only at the end of a dialog box menu does he or she gets feedback information on the correctness or incorrectness of their choice. Every change that is made had to be edited at first, then saved and previewed in a browser. If something went wrong, the whole procedure has to go from the beginning. Critical analysis of Omega's graphic interface suggests the need for development of more advanced modules enabling broader possibilities of presentation and content organization.