DEVELOPING E-LEARNING FACILITIES WITHIN AN INTEGRATED PORTAL ENVIRONMENT

The paper presents means of developing and implementing e-learning facilities within an integrated portal environment based on SharePoint technology. The portal learning facilities include the following: management content, communication (e-mail, char, discussion lists, blogs) and extensive e-learning facilities for various user categories: students, teachers, program managers, administrators. We have configured specific site templates for faculties, specializations and disciplines; access permissions depend on the user category. A discipline site template is designed on pedagogical principles and is structured on: description, syllabus, educational content, discussions, surveys, student tasks and site reports for teachers.
The portal is easily extendable with dedicated web parts. We are currently developing specific components for student evaluation, which can be used not only for final grading, but also for continuous student evaluation along the educational process and modelling their educational path.
The integrated solution displays important advantages related to specific information system and database synchronization facilities.
We compare and discuss the developed e-learning facilities with the ones provided in our distance learning portal, which have been evaluated by a dedicated questionnaire, concluding that they are more complex but nevertheless, their efficiency depends on the level of content filling-in. We also address comparisons with other e-learning systems, revealing the integration advantages provided by the solution we propose, and which has a good extensibility degree for other organization cases as well