Mile - Multifunctional Integrated Learning Environment

ABSTRACT MILE is an e-learning tool to support teaching, learning and student’s assessment during basic programming courses. This project integrates three existing educational systems: Mag, Svetovid and Testovid, developed by authors of the paper. Mag is the tutor for learning programming languages. Svetovid is system that helps instructors to leverage the effort of practical programming exercises and exams. Testovid is automated testing system, designed for assessing students’ assignments during practical exercises. This paper describes the structure and functionalities of MILE. KEYWORDS e-learning, educational systems, Integrated Learning Environment 1. INTRODUCTION It is becoming more and more evident that the requirements of commercial learning environments are too diverse to be provided by a single monolithic system (Manjon, 2002). First, we need a system related to the content production, and then these contents have to be put together into courses and delivered to learners. Then, system must provide support for communication and collaboration between students and teachers. Finally, student modelling must be implemented into the system, which will carry rich and detailed information concerning student’s progress through the course, and which needs to be linked to the system itself. Therefore, these environments are more likely to be produced as an integration of a number of specialized systems. Nowadays, there could be noticed a great importance being accorded to the open-source Web technologies regarding the online assessment methods in a flexible environment. The current development in the e-learning domain is conducted to a large amount of tools which obtain easier maintenance of online tests (Buraga, 2006). The main problem with online tutoring and testing systems is that they allow students to consult each other and share their solutions with other students from the group or even take tests instead of others (Pribela, 2007). Another problem with assessments systems is that they are not programming language independent. One of the rare systems with multi language support is TRY system, but it is a slightly outdated (Reek, 1989). The main motivation for this project is to produce environment for successful and easy learning and testing of basic principles of programming languages. This system allows students to take on-line courses, to test their knowledge, to submit their answers and receive automated feedback, to take on-line exams and be automatically assessed. These educational activities in MILE student can take in a computer laboratory or from a distant computer. Several security mechanisms integrated in MILE system allow easier monitoring of educational activities. The paper presents the technical and pedagogical goals of MILE, its principles of design, architecture and functionalities. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives overview of MILE components and section 3 concerns the overall architecture of the developed Web system. Section 4 refers to testing functionalities. Last section is dedicated to further directions of research and conclusions of the paper.