Special Research I

Session 10: Study Case in IT Field (4) (Lecturer: Shinichiro Kubota)

  Please carry out “This Session's Task” after reading and understanding the following contents.

[Introduction]

  Let me show my research works briefly. For these studies, I have kept collecting the information and experimenting on basement cases.

Research on a learning support system using the IP telephony system

  Recently, where the Web-based learning management system, usually called LMS, are used in any cases of university lectures, it has become important to use the LMS and get various feedback in an efficient way on the Internet. Then, I study an learning support system to assist the LMS. This support system is available for both the way we obtain feedback and instructions based on the feedback. It is serious how the support system collect the various feedback on the Internet. It is natural to use the IP telephony system for collecting feedback, because, using mobile phones and land-line phones, our feedback are easily record on the IP telephony system. And then we can access record feedback data via a PC through the Internet.

  As basic studies, I focus on to record feedback and to generate the learning material on the Internet by phones. Firstly, I have developed online recording system, which automatically handle the feedback calls and record those calls. In this system, the open-source IP telephony server "Asterisk" is useful. Secondly, I have developed the phone-based materials generation system. The uniqueness of this study lies in the use of "Asterisk" server as a mechanism to record the feedback and mobile phones and general land-line phones to input the voice so that the system could have a high-level usability.

Research on development of learning contents based on Flex SDK

  With spreading the broadband environment in Japan, the LMS (Learning Management System) is more often used than before. The LMS is a system to manage the learner's information and learning contents as well as the learning history of the learners. One standardization for the LMS and learning contents of this, is defined as the SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard. Such standardization of LMS and learning contents ensures compatibility and possible reuse of the learning contents. Although the most recent standard is SCORM 2004, there are not many LMSs compatible with SCORM 2004 therefore SCORM 1.2 is usually used. The SCORM define the API used for communication between learning contents and LMS, and the data model used for this communication. As long as the LMS and the learning contents are SCORM-compatible, the learner's name and ID can be displayed on the learning contents and the scores of the SCORM-compatible test can be sent to the LMS so that they can be recorded on LMS.

  To develop learning contents based on this SCORM, I am trying to use Flex SDK, one of the noticeable technologies used to develop Web 2.0 applications. The reason why I want to use the Flex SDK is that it has the following characteristics:

[1] to run the developed application on major Web browsers because it just requires Flash Player to run

[2] to be able to obtain cooperation of many developers because the Flex SDK is open-source framework

[3] to be able to create the user interface easily by using a markup language called mxml

[4]to be able to create our own component using Action Script 3

  In this study, using this Flex SDK, I develop such learning contents that are compatible with SCORM 1.2.