Jiang's Large Network Of Education Inspector Guidance System Design And Development

With the fast development of distance education in China, learner support has become an essential issue. Without an effective and sustaining learner support system, it will be very hard to detect those learners who are lagging behind. This seriously affects the quality of distance education. Non-academic support services, which focus on the administrative and affective sides of learner support, are essential parts of a learner support system. Active learner support is the support provided to learners before they encounter actual difficulties, and active learner support monitors learner's learning activities and helps improve learner's self-study skills.Focused on automatic learner monitoring and learner support service, this research designed an effective means to filter and analyze the huge amount of learner data stored on distance learning administration systems, and thus detect those learners lagging behind. Once such learners are detected, they can be contacted and alerted via online message, mobile phone message, online calendar and email. This provides a fast and effective way to provide accurate and personalized learner support information to learners. The research was based on on-site investigations of the actual learner support systems in several distance learning colleges in China, and combined with the current situations in the Distance Learning College at Jiangnan Universtiy.The goal of the research was to design an online learner support platform. The platform can analyze the huge amount of learner data stored on the current online learning administration system, and detect those students who have difficulties at each different learning stages. Teacher can then pay attention to those students continuously and take action accordingly when necessary. This will help reduce the number of students lagging behind and dropping out. The platform consists of two major parts: data analyzing component and information pushing component. The function of the data analyzing component is to retrieve and analyze data of the core activities of the learning process; the function of the information pushing component is to send information and alerts to students via means of mobile phone message, email, online calendar and online message. The platform was based on a three-layer .NET structure, and developed using the MS .NET Framework 3.5. This helps minimize the system interconnection and consequently improve the system quality. The three-layer .NET structure used the abstract-factory design pattern as it supports the seamless migration of multiple databases. The design pattern also helps solve the issues of reusability and system extensibility.