CSchool Interactive Design

Habib M. Fardoun

, Antonio Paules

, Sebastián Romero López

and Bassam Zafar

Information Systems Department, King Abdulaziz University (KAU)

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

Abstract. The design of an educational system involves a good understanding

of the whole school environment; in order to give the correct approach of how

to develop a comprehensive educational system as the real educational needs

for its operation. This article describes a design model of an educational system

based on the teaching methods applied in the Spanish primary and Secondary

schools, which takes into account the new advances in technology while pre-

serving the current teaching method of classroom, to ensure a quality teach-

ing/learning process. This development has been done by combining compo-

nents such as, Cloud Computing and Web Services. The proposed system is

based on a systematic approach, where different phases are implemented, con-

taining workflows and stages.

1 Introduction

The design and implementation of learning platforms are essential for the develop-

ment and future perspective of information technologies and communication and

knowledge management in teaching-learning process while preserving its quality. The

school users and students’ tutors (families) require an agile educative system in this

respect, which in turn is capable of storing the large volumes of information that are

managed during this process.

This is a catalyst that shows the urgent need to develop an effective, quality and

ease of use, and according to user needs, teaching/learning process by combining new

technologies for its development and approval, since, from our point of view, the

more complex the system is, it does not has to be more difficult and complicated to

use, that is done by taking into account all the needed factors, such as: way of work in

the classroom, teacher-student, tutor-student, etc. when creating and designing the

system.

Noteworthy that, our exposed research in this paper is the continuous of a large re-

search line that we have started since more than 5 years, by creating two educational

applications for schools: TabletNET [2] and eLearniXML [3], where we have com-

bined them with the use of several technologies that we have worked with within the

educational environments: Cloud Computing, Web Services; to finally create the new

educational system: CSshool.

Fardoun H., Paules A., Romero López S. and Zafar B..

CSchool Interactive Design.

DOI: 10.5220/0004096201250130

In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Interaction Design in Educational Environments (IDEE-2012), pages 125-130

ISBN: 978-989-8565-17-4

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 Project Definition and Necessity

From the educational point of view, the work at the school needs tools to act with the

curriculum materials, to develop better the collaborative work by allowing teachers to

organize better the presented teaching material using Information and Communication

Technologies (ICTs) [4], [5].

Taking into account the status of School 2.0 system [6], it is possible to highlight

the question: Which are the real necessities of the teachers in a daily classroom? This

is the question that has guide our research work, which we present in this paper.

Therefore, solving these necessities and how to make use of ICTs at the classroom

become our two main keys. The environment in which our system will be applied, is

as follows: the classroom; in addition to the equipment in the classroom, one tablet

per student; tablet for the teacher; printer; projector; port replicator and finally, a

wireless connection for the TabletsPC. Analyzing how schools are organized, we find

different types of centres that combine several courses with groups of different lev-

els, single track centres (just in one town) and others are distributed in several popu-

lations such as of the CRA (rural schools) [7]. Our first steps in the research were for

studying evolution of ICTs in the educational environments, and after having several

surveys and depending on European and American statistics, we found that the use of

ICTs is in a constant growth at the classroom, but it still exists some problems, which

are showing up with this growth. Some important weaknesses that have been found:

Low participation, between educational centres, in projects that make use of inter-

net, almost just 8%; The communication with the parents of the students through

internet, 26%; The elaboration of online resources for collaborative work, 30.6%; The

evaluation of the students using ICTs, 32%; and finally the Communication with the

families is so week.

Once these necessities have being shown, after performing many studies and re-

search within Spanish centres [8], we find that there is a really need for the use of an

application that facilitate these needs within the educational environment. But, be-

cause of the huge magnitude of the project and the requirements that we intent to

solve, we find that we have to take into consideration several characteristics, like:

flexibility of the system when new functionalities are incorporated, and making the

system accessible from others systems. All these needs, leads us to make use of Web

Services to achieve our goal, and of a new user interface of the system, to ensure its

easy use and understand by the new users (parents, etc.).

As a result, the focus while creating the system was on: from one side, creating a

bridge of communication with the students’ parents; and in the other side, to facilitate

the teachers’ work in the classroom and the enhancements of the collaborative work

between students.

3 CSchool Interactive Design System

In this section we present and identify the elements that support the CSchool system,

starting its: architecture, functionalities and its user interfaces.

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3.1 Architecture and Functionalities

While designing the system architecture, we took into consideration that the educa-

tional content and the activities of students are hosted in Web content managers.

These Web services provide us the basis for the interaction of the users and the sys-

tem content. Besides, the system must have an architecture that allows the access to it

from any device, and a central secure system, with authentication, that allows the

distribution and management of the content, providing flexibility by acceding it

through the use of Web services.

The functions of the system are employed through the use of Web services. These

Web services are points of input and output of the system, facilitating the communi-

cation between the different parts of the architecture. What we take value of and em-

phasize in, are of how the communication between the various Web services can

benefit from the Web services communication in banking environment [9], so we can

adapt it to our needs in this educational and information system.

The main parts of the system could be defined as cloud of services, some of them are:

Storage logic, which provides the logic of the system files storage; School, provides

the business logic; Services, it provides access to the system and generates accurate

views of the information in the other clouds; Administrative, it is enrich with the

received data from the educative environment part “School”, which provide the nec-

essary data for the country’s education department to establish the students’ curricula;

and finally the Evaluation, where the tools for the evaluation are.

Fig. 1. Shows the location of the cloud of services between the different parts of the system, to

obtain a dynamic system; Thus, its growth is through the creation of Web services to add new

services, or Web services that allow the access to private or public clouds, of other educational

entities, to assist in the educational world or who need to monitor the educational system itself.

The implementation of this architecture, see Fig. 1, favours the increase of services

that could be deployed (or added) to facilitates the growth of it; also it leads to a bet-

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ter communication, between the different parts of the cloud of services, as the infor-

mation traffic, thanks to the support that the Web services technology provides them.

At the end of this study, we noted the need to accommodate the business logic in

separate layers. Thus, in the future we may choose to add new layers to the system, or

other systems would need to access the existent one.

3.2 User Interface

Each educational system must be distributed in several applications that can give

support to its different users, in our case, the principle users of the system are: Teach-

er, Student and parents.

Starting with the teacher application, we find that he must has access to an easy

and dynamic, drag and drop, application with an amicable graphic interface, which

contains all necessary elements, and could be extended for the inclusion of future

features depending on his needs [2]. Also, it must provide him the final view for the

development of the activity, from his side as from the student view, to facilitate the

development and implementation of this activity [11]. In this section, it is presented

some of the catches of the desktop application of the system, see Fig. 2, where the

main interface with members of the educational community act while using CSchool,

are presented. Where a special attention is given to the parts used by teachers and

students.

Fig. 2. This figure shows the two steps of the teacher interface, where the teacher, first, can

select a number of elements to compose the activity for teaching process, and later, he can view

the aspect of the student interface with the elements he has selected for him.

In the creation of activities in real life, teachers have all the options offered by

their respective environments. To some extent, one of the weaknesses of computer

systems is that, it is not easy to emulate the combination of the available resources.

For that, in CSchool, we offer teachers the option of creating activities, in which he

you can choose all the objects involved in them, from a text editor, to a discussion

tool, presentations, calendar etc. more detailed information about the system design

and work can be found in [2], [3].

During the development of the graphical user interface, we took into account, the

new academic resources, and the incorporation of new users, students and teachers, to

the school. For this, the interface is designed so the users can obtain a homogeneous

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working environment and as simple as possible. Another point that was taken into

account was the collaborative work between teachers and students. The graphical

icons that represent the same action are identical at the teacher and student interfaces.

And at the same time, a distinction between user interfaces for different user levels

was done, so the teacher can have classify them depending on their educative level.

And for this we have created different interfaces for downloading, browsing and

sending documents, see Fig 3.

Fig. 3. These interfaces are for uploading and downloading files: Uploading documents se-

quentially on the same screen. After that the teacher can view the available options about the

navigation between the documents previously uploaded to the system.

Another feature of the system is that it allows students and teachers to send their

files using a private email account, and to access these files in an online way, as

shown in Fig. 3, thanks to our use of the Cloud and Web Services. This make possi-

ble that the system works as a multi-server application, in which it can access several

servers in different physical locations, and it is here, where it is determined which

type of configuration does the centre has.

4 Conclusions and Future Work

In this research work we have presented a new educational system of quality. Its new

features make it a solid and a innovate system to be used by the scholar users (teach-

ers, students, parents, etc.). It combines many new technologies, such as cloud com-

puting and Web services to distribute better the information, access it, and work with

it in an easy and dynamic way, also it was developed to support distributed user inter-

faces, which would make it a easy to use and interact with.

By supporting the ISO 9126-1, we prove that the system ensures, it compliment to

all the quality points, without losing any effectiveness of the traditional learn-

ing/teaching process, thus our main point still the creation of an effective and com-

plete educational system, that schools can work with.

As a future work, we are working on the installation of this system within different

schools in Spain, to test it and obtain a complete and professional feedback that can

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help us to improve the system in its future versions. In the other hand, we are working

in parallel to these results, to create a secondary application that will allow teachers

and tutors, to control the student’s application at classroom and home, by applying

distributed user interfaces, to obtain more control over the student learning produc-

tion.

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