A multi-channeled lecture materials enquiry system

Abstract

Nowadays, the use of IT in teaching and learning is very common. With the popularization of wireless network and mobile computing, distance learning based on mobile equipments, such as mobile phones and PDAs, attracts increasing attention. However, some limitations of the existing education portals are found, for example, mostly the searching function is not provided in this kind of system, and the accessibility from mobile devices is very low, especially for mobile phones. The main reason is that the types of document format supported by mobile phone are too few. This project, thus, focuses on implementing a multi-channeled lecture materials enquiry system, PowerStore. This web application supports both Desktop and mobile phone. To solve the problem of presenting lecture materials on mobile phone, PPT documents can be converted to images, HTML or XML documents. PPT to XML conversion is selected due to its wide application and small size. To display XML documents on mobile phone, J2ME is chosen in this project despite XSLT is another possible solution. Once the PPT slides are uploaded, a file converter would be automatically triggered to convert those slides to XML documents on server. The lecture materials can be retrieved from a web application. At the same time, an XML Viewer running on mobile phone is built to display the contents of XML documents. PowerStore provides not only high performance for transaction time, but also high accessibility and usability. Users can be benefited from this system because they can access to the online presentations at any time and in any place with a small and inexpensive handheld device – mobile phone.