On Building Teaching Resources System Based on Open Source Portal

Zhou Hang Xia1 Yu Ke Guang2 Lu Hui Juan1 Liu Yan Qiu1

1 China JiLiang University 2 Zhejiang Water Conservancy And Hydropower College Hangzhou,China Hangzhou,China

e-mail: zhx@cjlu.edu.cn yukg@zjwchc.com hjlu@cjlu.edu.cn lyq@cjlu.edu.cn

Abstract—This paper discusses the principle of designing a application system of teaching resources management by using program concept, it presents the system development platform in the process of designing , the basic methods used in information resources management are also mentioned., then several open-source portals were introduced and evaluated. Finally, the example of developing a platform of teaching resources system and designing management module are offered.

Keywords-Teaching Resources System Open source Portal, Evaluation

I. . INTRODUCTION

With the development of network technology and educational technology, Internet-based network education develops fast. How to manage teaching resources scientific and apply teaching resources efficient becomes an important task. As a result of the variety of teaching resources content, people have different understanding, so then emerge a large number of different levels, different attributes of teaching resources, therefore an efficient management system of teaching resources is an important essential infrastructure to modern teaching system [1]. This paper discussed the pattern of a application system of teaching resources management and the preliminary system design.

II. TEACHING RESOURCES MANAGEMENTAPPLICATION SYSTEM DESIGN

Constructing teaching resources is the basis of information technology education, requires long-term construction and maintenance. Constructing teaching resources can be divided into four levels:(1) Building material of teaching resources, include questions libraries, material libraries, course libraries and case libraries;(2)Network Course Construction;(3) Education resource management system

development;(4) General education system ,which supports platform integration.

A. System Design Principles In order to play the strengths of teaching resources,

the system of teaching resources management must be able to organize various forms of teaching resources scientifically and can provide user a friendly fast application platform. Let the teaching resources service becomes more effective for the teaching [2].

1. Reliability Teaching resources high availability is essential for teaching resources platform, together with a large number of teaching resources, system must be of superior performance, large-scale commercial database system. This will help improve high-volume data throughput time, so that make the whole systems management standardization. In addition, after the occurrence of catastrophic failure, it can restore the database in the shortest possible time, so that data integrity and security can be guaranteed.

2. Flexible The material management in the data management should have greater flexibility, so material of every discipline can be centrally managed. Material can also be divided according to the type or subject for a separate single management. What is more system should provide interface, then teaching resources which collected by multiple channels can be managed by the system.

3. OpenSystem must has completely open attribute, it

should be able to store all forms of online teaching content, not only just limited to teaching content developed by some specific tools, not only just support certain file formats. System should support the open format file storage, it can be able to manage course and file formats running in-line (include the files which need plug), in all, it has no limited requirements for teaching resources.

System software architecture uses B / S network model. System server uses scalable multi-server

2009 Eighth IEEE International Conference on Embedded Computing; IEEE International Conference on Scalable Computing and Communications

978-0-7695-3825-9/09 $26.00 © 2009 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/EmbeddedCom-ScalCom.2009.104

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2009 Eighth IEEE International Conference on Embedded Computing; IEEE International Conference on Scalable Computing and Communications

978-0-7695-3825-9/09 $26.00 © 2009 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/EmbeddedCom-ScalCom.2009.104

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International Conference on Scalable Computing and Communications; The Eighth International Conference on Embedded Computing

978-0-7695-3825-9/09 $26.00 © 2009 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/EmbeddedCom-ScalCom.2009.104

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computing model. Sub-module hierarchy, separate multi-module and distributed parallel processing are employed to improve system efficiency. Every functional module is an ordinary network procedure, which builds on the open standard network following the HTTP, FTP, XML and other common network protocols and data formats to information process and data exchange.

4. Safety Security includes confidentiality, integrity protection, authentication and authorization. Networks use encryption as much as possible to help reduce risks and rights associated with restrictions on the public network and private network transmission of sensitive information.

B. System Function Design Teaching resources management system needs to

achieve the following functions [3]:1. Teaching Resources Searching System should provide a powerful search engine,

courseware tree generation and dynamic modification mechanisms. It also should offer courseware and teaching resources library inquiring, and it have a ability of automatically searching for related education research site to extend the search database. Last but not the least, it should support a variety of full-text and many type documents research.

2. Teaching Resources Compiling Students are the main body for learning and

teachers are the leaders of the teaching and learning activities. To play the initiative of these two main, students or teachers must be able to compile and organize a variety of teaching resources download from the Internet, and these collect resources can become resources which can be well used by them. Any teaching resources can be easily input and modified for the system. The system can also need to provide editor, production, preview and other functions for a variety of text material, image material, audio material, video material and animation, other teaching material components, questions and network course, etc. System may also retrieve the useful material from the teaching resources which just sorted by the system, and then we can increase and improve the useful material in accordance with demand to update the teaching resources.

3. Teaching Resources Management When we get a great deal of information, we must

use the appropriate methods to filter analysis and process it to retention the useful and removal the useless. Therefore, the system must provide management tools to deal with a great deal of teaching resources. A variety of remote or local media material,

question library and online tutorials, etc, we must use scientific and professional methods to classify and manage them.

4. Organizing Teaching Resources for Use Effectively using of collected teaching resources is

also the key part of the teaching management application system. Teachers will apply teaching resources for teaching and students will apply them for studying. According to the need of the teaching, teachers can prepare class by choosing the various forms of teaching resources from the teaching resources application system, and this can let teachers flexibly organize and edit classes to form a personal teaching courseware. So teachers can give full play to their teachings. Students can also according to their needs to choose materials for study, so it can active and improve learning interest obviously.

III. SEVERAL OPEN SOURCE PORTALS ANALYSIS

By introducing and analyzing several open source portals, which can help us choose a suitable development platform for specific projects.

Providing a high-level open-source code portal based on the portlet, GridSphere was developed under the GridLab project which was founded by EU, and it provides a very complex portlet, which provides a high degree of customization environment for a variety of end-users. Portlet model provides users with a flexible and easy-to-use interface, and a model is also offered to developers to create insertable and dynamic applications[4]. GridSphere API is very similar to the JSR Portlet API 1.0’s last standard.

Liferay is on behalf of all the complete J2EE application, which uses the Web, EJB and JMS technology, and especial the front interface part uses Struts Framework technology. The portlet based on the XML configuration files are dynamic free to expansion. Web Services can support some remote information access. Apache Lucene is used to realize full-text search function. Liferay's shortcomings is lack of a clear, simple and extendable framework design, the whole structure is more complicated and larger. Struts1.1 itself does not support the JSR168, so when the Liferay on realizing the context sharing problems, it looks stupid and has no fundamental solutions to the problems. Because the portlet design is more cluttered, the second development is rather difficult.

JetSpeed is an open-source portal project organized by the Apache. When after the JSR168 is released in 2003, Apache began to develop the Jetspeed2 and provide the full support for JSR168, and the JetSpeed will soon become a standardized Java Portlet API. JetSpeed is an open source code realization of

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Enterprise Information Portal (EIP), which uses Java and XML technology. Customers can use the browser, mobile phone supporting the WAP protocol or other equipments to visit the portal which is built on Jetspeed for information. Jetspeed plays the role of collecting information; it can settle the message together and provide them to users easily. We can manage users, Groups, roles and permissions through Jetspeed security portlets. JetSpeed controls the portlet access based on the role.

eXo Platform is an open source enterprise portal solution scheme, Its framework is based on the Java (tm) Server Faces (JSF) web layer, following the portlet API (JSR 168). Further more this open-source project uses the open source technology, such as Pico Container, JbossMX and Aspect. eXo has so many advanced technologies, but there are still some shortcomings to it, which mainly has as follows: Due to Portal Server using xmldb to process their data, which becomes messy code when saving them to the database and its default platform character set is ISO-8859_1 which is lack of full support of the Chinese, so when develop portal for the Chinese there is no advantage. Since the JSF is a heavy-weight performance layer framework, it makes the eXo secondary development work relatively huge. The Business Portal application development needs to purchase License.

IV. SEVERAL OPEN-SOURCE PORTAL ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION

A. Evaluation Standards Every open source framework has its merits and

shortcomings, if there is no comprehensive set of standards to evaluate them; it is hard to say which frameworks are better [5]. In fact, from the view of the project, there is no best technology but the most suitable technology. However, we usually choose a technology as far as possible to pursuit perfect function, easy development and expansion, comprehensive documentation and so on. In this paragraph, our main evaluation criteria are whether or not these portlets can be well reused. Here are some standards:

a) Follow the JSR168 specification. This is the most important requirement of these standards, Support the norms well means to do well reuse and interact with other portal products.

b) Easy to install. The database configuration and web application server release is easy to operate.

c) Whether there is a detailed installation document, development documentation and user manuals.

d) Online Support. Including the development community, Wiki, mail list and so on, when encounter

problems using the portal products whether can find quick solutions to the problems.

e) Potal management. When we manage programmers, what we consider are whether it is friendly, convenient, easy to add user management, role management, classified management, layout, skin management, add and delete portlets and so on.

f) Portlet resources library. General Portal framework can attach a number of portlets which can be reusable. Such as, mail portlet, calendar table portlet and search portlet.

g) Performance Indicators. Include Portal framework start-up time, portlet loading time and database access time.

h) Security mechanism. Many Portal frameworks have the default security mechanism, but the default authentication and authorization mechanisms are far from meeting the requirements of certain large projects. Here, we mainly consider whether portal frame can integrate well with JAAS, SSO and SSL security technology, as well as the degree of integrating difficulty.

i) Technological development. Different Portal frameworks base on different development technology, Such as Struts, JSF, Spring, Hibernate, Tiles, EJB and Web services technology.

j) Portal features. Portal framework is usually attached some very useful features in addition to as a portal / portlet container. For example, content management system, workflow, management and monitoring tools.

k) Server compatibility. This standard mainly tests portal framework whether can run very well in the most mainstream servers, such as Tomcat, JBoss, Weblogic, Websphere and so on .

l) Support the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) specification.

B. Framework Evaluation Based on the above evaluation criteria, we can

test each open-source Portal framework. For them Scores from 1 to 5, 5 are the highest scores. Then we can draw the open source portal framework scores statistics in table1.

1. TABLE1.OPEN SOURCE PORTAL FRAMEWORK SCORES STATISTICS TABLE.

Criteria Portal Framework GridS_phere

eXoPlatform

Liferay StringBeans

Follow JSR168 Norms

5 5 5 5

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Easy to install 5 5 5 5

Documentatio-n

4 3 3 5

Online Support

4 4 3 5

PortalManagement

4 5 4 5

Self Define 4 3 5 4

Portlet Resource Library

4 3 5 3

Performance 3 4 3 3

Safe 3 4 4 4

Technology 4 5 4 3

PortalFeatures

3 5 4 2

ServerCompatibility

3 4 5 3

WSRP Standard

0 3 3 0

Sum 51 57 58 51

V. THE REAL EXAMPLE OF THE TEACHINGRESOURCES SYSTEM DEVELOPING PLATFORM AND THE

DESIGNING OF MANAGEMENT MODULE

Based on the above design and analysis, we chose Liferay open source Portal to develop such system. This system is based on HTTP and XML which are the open network standards, and it is an easy-to-use web application and suitable for running on the Internet or internal network. As shown in Figure 1.The browser / server (B / S) mode let the system can be used remotely.

Figure 1 The central teaching resource portal homepage

Figure 2 The Interface of Resources aggregation modules

Information management is a necessary condition to make the information become a true resource.

To make teaching resources serve the teaching efficiently, the key is the management of teaching resource. Therefore organizing, controlling, processing and planning are a prerequisite for effective use of teaching resources [6]. The management of teaching resources is summarized in the five areas: deposit, classify, transmit, find and use. Deposit is preservation and retention; Classify is collation and processing; Transmit is dissemination and transmission; Find is searching; Use is utilizing (Figure 2 .The Interface of Resources aggregation modules). This system is centered as teaching and resources to achieve the purpose of efficient, fast, easy-to-use, and then teachers and students can take full advantage of remote education resources for enjoying better teaching and learning activities.

REFERENCE

[1]Chai xiaolu,Web Web services interoperability and open architecture technology[M],Beijing: Tsinghua University Press,2002.[2]Educational Technology, Research Center of Tsinghua University,Campus Network Teaching Resources Research Project Report, [EB/OL] http://www.edu.cn, 2008. [3] Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Teacher's guide,[EB/OL]http://www.cccbc.net/elearn/doc/?file=teacher.html,Autumn,2002.[4]Yang lin, Guo jinhua, Under modern information technology analysis and build new teaching model[J],Journal of Gansu Union University(Natural Science Edition ),2006(05). [5]Li xuwen, Open Platform Technology Data Migration Research[J], Scientific and technical information,2006(02)155-156.[6]Kong yitong, The Application of Open Source Software Research[D]. East China Normal University, 2005.

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