An Online course management system for the faculty of humanities and Social Sciences, University of Ruhuna

Abstract

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has revolutionized practices in business, government, health, and education amongst others. In education, the Internet and World Wide Web opened new doors for traditional teaching and learning environment. Thereby affording educators an opportunity to deploy new teaching, learning and administration strategies and affording learners a rich learning experience. Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Ruhuna currently rely on a traditional course management system to handle their course management activities. The traditional system is not efficient enough to cater to the increasing demand and does not support for providing up to date information to the management. Although there are various customizable commercial products available in the market, those are cannot handle every unique domain requirements. In addition to this those are most expensive in the international market. Hence the domain authority expects to develop a tailor made software system. This dissertation describes the development of a web based course management system for the Faculty ofHumanities and Social Sciences. Object oriented techniques were used for analysis and design of the proposed system while CSS, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, and MySQL technologies were used to implementation. Implemented system was tested and evaluated. This system satisfies the requirements of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and ready for up loading into the apache web server. In Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, Online Course Management Systems has been adopted to facilitate existing course management practices and overcome limitations of existing course management, but has evolved into a generic on-line course management platform. It also provides some insight into what can be achieved towards on-line learning by a single programmer using a collection ofopen-source tools.