DEVELOPING AN ONLINE E-LEARNING SYSTEM FOR TEACHING FUNDAMENTALS OF OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING

Electronic learning (E-Learning) provides an effective educational method, which enables both students and teachers to remove limitations of the traditional education and perform education activities with the support of more advanced technologies. Today, there are many different ways and methods to perform E-Learning activities in schools. But new E-Learning models include the use of computers and computer based programs mostly. By using the computer technology, learning management systems (LMS), online tutors and other special-purpose computer applications are designed and developed to be used in education activities.
This paper describes an online E-Learning application system that can be used to teach fundamentals of object oriented programming. With the developed system, students can learn theoretical and practical aspects of the object oriented programming by using some learning tools and documents. By using the system interface, students can view interactive animations, exercises, videos and lecture notes about the object oriented programming. Moreover, they can take some tests and check their knowledge about the given subject. The system also employs an intelligent programming tutor, which can be used by students to write small program codes and check the written codes for possible errors. While writing a program code, students receive some intelligent feedbacks to correct their errors and write the true "object oriented" program. Working principles of this tutor were determined according to Ohlsson's theory on "learning from errors". In addition to students' learning activities, teachers can use an admin panel to organize learning tools and documents provided in the system. They can add or remove the mentioned learning documents, prepare tests about the object oriented programming and add small questions for the intelligent programming tutor. They can also view some statistical information about each student's learning activities on the system. The developed E-Learning system provides an easy to use application interface and can be executed on any Java enabled web browser. With this system, an effective and efficient education environment for both students and teachers can be ensured easily.