Abstract:

The paper recognizes the significant role that e-learning plays in modern education and acknowledges the impact of recent global events on its growth. The paper emphasizes the importance of student motivation in the success of e-learning initiatives, which is closely tied to the quality and type of feedback that students receive. The authors categorize four types of feedback that e-learning systems can offer, and they propose a formal definition of student success with course materials. This definition likely encompasses factors like comprehension, engagement, and application of the material.

The paper also describes an experiment conducted to investigate the influence of feedback on student success. The authors are interested in understanding how different types of feedback affect student learning outcomes.

Overall, the paper underscores the crucial role that feedback systems play in e-learning environments. Effective feedback not only provides students with guidance and assessment but also serves as a motivational tool to enhance their learning experiences. By highlighting the importance of feedback and its connection to student motivation and success, the paper suggests a certain type of feedback mechanisms in e-learning systems to improve overall learning outcomes.

The paper is based on our experience that we got with several online courses. These courses were developed using an e-learning platform known as WBT Master, which serves as a Learning Management System (LMS). WBT Master is specifically designed for educators to construct and manage e-learning courses effectively. Each of these e-learning courses is essentially a structured collection of online resources, supplemented by additional communication tools.

Within the WBT Master system, individual e-learning courses are constructed as a collection of applications that support different training activity. The training activity can be passive where students simply consume the information presented in different forms, and active – where students perform some actions. The active part of any course can be evaluated and assesses using certain schemas. The training applications can be also divided into two parts – passive and active. Among the passive applications are the following:

Announcements Application:
This application is built around a list of announcements, typically taking the form of HTML or text documents. These announcements are presented in a scrollable list format.

Course Curriculum Application:
Here, textual or other document types are utilized to outline course details such as schedules, objectives, prerequisites, and requirements. These documents are presented as a dropdown menu of members.

Course Library Application:
This application serves as a repository for training materials, presented in a hierarchical structure comprising folders and sub-folders.
Teaching Aids Application: Similar to the Course Library, this application contains educational resources. However, the distinctive feature is that it includes other applications as its components.

Keywords:

Software architecture, e-learning, learning management system.