A Matter of Necessity

Abstract

The WWW is a resource of enormous potential for education. The use of this resource for presentation of learning materials is well documented (Alexander 1996; Darbyshire and Wenn 1996; Freeman 1997), but the Web can also provide versatility and be of great benefit to subject administrators. By exploiting the Web’s distributed nature and platform independence, a subject administrator can provide better service to students and at the same time increase the flexibility and efficiency with which some of the more mundane administration tasks are performed. In this chapter, we describe the design and development of a Web Based Learning Administration (WBLA) system initially developed to complement work we began on Web Based Learning (Darbyshire and Wenn 1996a). This project became a matter of necessity because of the multi-campus nature of our university. In the background section, information is given on subject management, Web based administration, Victoria University of Technology and a survey of similar work undertaken by others. A development framework and a model are then discussed. The details of the architecture of the of the WBLA system project we are building and security are discussed in the next section. A detailed description of the system is given and related to the model previously presented. Some responses to a trial of the system are given and future enhancements we envisage are presented in the final section.