LCMS for Online Vocabulary Education - A Developers' Portal

Abstract

While a lot of people have heard about “distance learning” or “distance education”, elearning nowadays is a new term which enables knowledge transfer in a completely different way. Not only students, children in kindergartens also benefit from IT technologies. Since education raises the demands for e-learning platforms for children, tremendous amount of applications have been created for this purpose. This trend also leads business enterprises to investigate on different e-learning materials creation tools, especially when game-based learning has become a trend in children’s learning. Today, there are a plenty of learning games creation tools available on web. However, each platform has its specific formats and standards which impede the reusability, customizability and interoperability of the created learning materials. It then gives rise to the need of an environment for easier creation and maintenance of such learning game materials. To cope with existing needs, a flexible environment based on framework LCMS (Learning Content Management System) is created in this project. LCMS is a framework that provides a platform to create, modify and deliver the learning contents. By applying popular question types and structured Web Services for flash communication, this environment creates a fast and effective way to make learning games for teachers and standardizes a formal data linkage into flash for educational games developers. As children education put much emphasis on vocabulary learning, this project development will focus on the construction of a development portal for two purposes: (1) To help developers to construct words teaching games and (2) to help teachers to maintain and share learning contents. The main functions of the platform are to provide an API and vocabulary management facilities for programmers and teachers to create their own words learning games. These will be achieved by developing a LCMS structured authoring portal and learning object repository.