Abstract:

The ability to provide a wide range of challenging interactive learning activities is one of the most important features of the virtual learning environment. Creating high-quality interactive learning activities is both expensive and time-consuming.
Designing and developing learning activities with interactive multimedia, directly affects the interaction of an online environment and enhance e-learning effectiveness and learner’s perceived learning since the teacher is not present in front of the learner as in the traditional class room.
There are several software tools called, rapid activity development tools ,but due to the low level of customization and not being free & open source it’s difficult to apply various multimedia strategies and instructional designing strategies into the activity developed by the rapid software development tools.
Flash is a powerful tool that can be used to develop many different types of interactive learning activities, within the context on an online course. Using Flash, instructional designers can design and develop activities according to their own preferred way of customization to apply various strategies of multimedia and instructional designing. Unlimited attempts can be made for these activities and the activity could be reloaded until the learner thoroughly understood the concept guided by various feedback.
Although lots of learning activities have been developed in this kind of environment, there should be a proper way of accessing and sharing the activities developed by different content development team members within a virtual learning environment to avoid the repetition of similar work and low level of reusability which might negatively affect the productivity and quality of the work being done.
Today, there are many Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) but it is not possible to promote sharing since there were no appropriate mechanisms to store, view and search for the activity. Therefore, there is a need of finding a solution to help with the storing, accessing and reusing of e-learning activities used in content development process by connecting all stakeholders of the content development process.
In this paper, we present the design & development of an online infrastructure to automate the process of handling interactive e-learning activities in e-Learning Center (eLC) of the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC) in such a way that it provides an efficient, user friendly system for content development process to relieve the daily work and increase the productivity while taking the maximum use of existing interactive e-learning activities.
We decided to introduce a web based solution with proper classification for activity collection to create a repository which can act as a learning activity management system as well as a tool to develop learning activities. Although the system has been developed based on the need of the eLC of UCSC, the system is flexible enough to use any other organization having e-learning activities.
The initial system is iteratively revised based on feedback from the users and evaluation and implementation of the system has done. Based on the testing of the system, we gained positive response regarding the searching, viewing, accessing and reusing of activity.

Keywords:

Interactive learning, repository, e-learning, LCMS.