POODLE: USE OF THE WEB 2.0 TO DEVELOP AN ACCESIBLE E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Poodle is a Web application that relies on technology from Microsoft ASP.NET to create a LMS (Learning Management System) based on Web 2.0 principles such as socialization or content sharing, and accessibility making these contents available to anyone independently of any physical or technological barrier. The arrival of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) promotes the reduction of hours of class attendance for practices supervised by teachers. This reduction requires the use of tools such as LMS so students and teachers can be in contact.

For the development of the e-learning environment ASP.NET Framework was chosen because is a modern technology that is platform independent and enables rapid application development (RAD). Among the advantages of using ASP.NET we have a clear separation between business logic code and presentation code and thanks to be component based we get a widely scalable platform.

The term Web 2.0 describes the current trend of the use of Web design and technology to enhance creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users. Poodle tries to incorporate various Web 2.0 features using different technologies and / or tools:
* Providing a rich user experience trying to bring the desktop to the Web by using AJAX (ASP.NET AJAX extensions).
* Promoting the participation of users, who are the ones who create the content. Poodle will provide tools such as blogs and forums as well as the ability of teachers to share their content.
* Dynamic content as the result of user participation. This content is shared through the use of exchange formats such as RSS
* Metadata, use of data describing the contents. Any content provided on the platform uses tags to describe the information.
* Use of Web standards, CSS and XHTML has been used for the construction of the pages separating the content from the presentation.
* Scalability, achieved with the use of services hosted on third parties servers and the use of mash-ups. Provides access for hosting videos on Youtube and documents on Scribd. In addition the functions of Poodle are available by exposing the business logic services through Web Services.

Poodle also makes a strong emphasis on usability and accessibility. To improve the user experience different user-oriented design techniques has been used such as user archetyping and card-sorting for the structure of the web. Several tools have been incorporated like Clean URLs in order to make the user understand the structure of the web in an easy way.

Access to education should not be closed and must be accessible to everyone. The current LMS cannot come to fully meet the accessibility standards and some are in the rewriting process. Therefore, one of the main objectives of POODLE is to create an e-learning system fully accessible to any teacher or student regardless of presenting any kind of personal or technological disability. In order to achieve this, POODLE follows the guidelines of the WCAG 1.0 referenced in a multitude of laws that requires at least meeting the level 2 priority tests.