Abstract:

Web-based training is popular around the world, where a large number of people can study at the same time through the Internet anytime and anywhere. The contents of courseware are presented to learners using multimedia such as text, diagrams, images, animation, music, and videos. They can check the results of their study by themselves because the score is displayed after questions are answered. For example, Moodle is used as an online infection prevention and control program for medical students. A Web-based e-Learning platform for physical education provides sports related courseware which includes physical motions, exercise rules and first-aid treatment. The courseware is represented using digital multimedia materials which include video, 2D animation and 3D virtual reality. Autonomous learning plays an important role in raising students’ learning effect and innovation ability. W. Song, et al. developed a system that consists of a management system, a learning system, a homework system and an interactive answering system. Semantic Web technology in e-Learning offers various semantic-based services to the students and the instructors. Students can perform semantic querying for learning materials.
The major issue of current e-Learning is the difficulty of resources sharing and searching, which is mostly caused by the weak-semantic learning resources and the poor sharing mechanism. To solve this problem, for example, by applying ontology and Web services technology to e-Learning, the learning resources are well defined and information exchanging is supported. Qu and Nejdl re-designed all learning resources contained in an existing Java course according to SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) so that they can be exchanged between different learning management systems. A Web-based SCORM run-time environment was also implemented using JSP, Java Servlet, and JavaScript, which is able to dynamically render course structure into its corresponding Web presentation on the basis of predefined SCORM content packaging application profiles. However, to make SCORM-conformable courseware, some knowledge about HTML and JavaScript is required. Li and Zhang failed to add some useful resources or contents from SCORM to Moodle because of the lack of interoperability between SCORM and Moodle. They needed to implement adding, editing, deleting and moving those resources in Moodle. On the other hand, WebOL creates some questions based on Web pages and packages them so that they can be available in another platform. It generates HTML and JavaScript code and maintains all resources in a single directory ready for distribution. A project can be run from a Web browser by opening the start-up page created by WebOL. However, it does not contain any features for the recording of assessment results. This paper presents a SWF (Sharable Web Fragment)-based e-Learning system, where courseware is created with sharable Web fragments such as Web pages, images and other resources, and the courseware can be distributed to another platform by export and import facilities. The exported meta-information is architecture-independent and provides a model of courseware distribution.

Keywords:

Web-based training, distribution, e-learning, export, import, sharable, e-learning system.