Abstract:

In account of increasing globalization and internationalization more and more multilingual courses are offered at universities. Learning management systems (LMS) are used to support teaching and study organization. In Saxony almost all universities use the Learning Management System OPAL called on-line platform for academic teaching and learning at saxon universities.
A simple and easy preparation, management and announcement of courses with multilingual content are necessary to increase the user support in the area of e-Learning. The access and usage should be easy for users and offers of the LMS OPAL.
The aim is to develop a long-term future oriented solution for a user-oriented optimization of the Learning Management System OPAL. Beside the implementation of the multilingualism, the main focus is an easy service for administrators of courses and users, as well as the implementation into the live-system. Therefore, the concept and implementation must occur under the aspect of the efficiency. The effort for creation of multilingual courses should be very low for course authors. It will be really easy to enter multilingual courses to OPAL with a clear surface and additional tools like translation programs which deliver a translation proposal.
A concept is introduced for the restructuring. This concept contained the implementation into the live- system OPAL with main focus to efficient and user-oriented integration. Besides, an easy changeover from monolingual to multilingual courses should occur. This should be not observably for the OPAL user. Main idea of the concept is to set up components of a course normally in several languages. First a standard language is defined for a course as long as no other language is wished. The course is normally displayed in the language defined in the user settings. Beside the standard language a course can be extended by different other languages. For the feature multilingualism the structure of a course and its modules must be extended.