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COMMON EDUCATIONAL WEB SPACE  AS A NEW 
PARADIGM FOR INTERNATIONAL E-LEARNING 
 
N. Andreeva*, N. Scerbakov**, A.Schukin* 
 
* Institute of Computer Science and Technology 
Peter the Great Saint-Petersburg Polytechnic University 
St.Petersburg, Russia 
 
**IICM, Graz University of Technology, 
Graz, Austria 
E-mail: nsherbak@iicm.tugraz.at 
 
 
ABSTRACT 
In this paper we present an innovative eLearning project being developed in 
collaboration by St.Petersburg Technical University and Graz University of 
Technology, Austria. The project aims to develop a common educational WEB 
space for distant teaching of different  aspects of database technology. The 
method can be applied for teaching students which have different specialities and 
background knowledge. The method can be also easily adopted for so-called Life-
Long-Learning (LLL), and can seriously amend a current practice of Massive 
Open Online Courses (MOOC). 
The common educational WEB space consists of a number of Learning 
Management Systems (LMS) used by partner universities, reusable educational 
content structured as so-called SCORM modules, and a shared online database 
laboratory. 
The previously mentioned functional components are seamlessly syndicated into 
an integrated system by means of a number of WEB services. For example, the 
laboratory is actually an Internet server with a DataBase Management System 
(DBMS), and a number of WEB service entries for integrating the laboratory into 
other eLearning components such as WEB Exams, Project developing space, and 
so on. The presentation provides a detailed technical specification of WEB 
services, and a reproduceable description of usage scenarios. The paper will 
present practical results of the pilot application of the system, discuss problems 
that were found out, and offer possible solutions. 
 
ELEARNING AND EDUCATIONAL WEB SPACE 
 
WEB space is normally perceived as a set of resources and services offered 
through the Internet. More specifically, educational WEB space is a Learning 
Management Systems (LMS), providing access to course specific materials, 
necessary communication, verification and data exchange facilities. Typically, 
students access written scripts or prerecorded video lectures, comment the text or 
movies, discuss the content using an online forum or chat.  Data exchange 
facilities are necessary since students are supposed to perform some training 
actions and upload results for evaluation by teachers. Success of eLearning 
essentially depends on online monitoring and verification of students progress 
with the course material. 
To implement a common educational web space we have to decide on the 
following aspects of such WEB sites: 
- mutually recognized basic data structuring paradigm and functionality. 
- data exchange standard that provides a seamless integration of data available 
from one site into the context of another WEB site possibly implemented in 
another operational environment (LMS). 
- common way of evaluating students results with the course materials. 
Content of a particular educational WEB site consists of the following 
components: 
 
Announcements. Course announcements allow teachers to promptly announce 
important course events in a form of a sequence of textual documents that are 
sorted in a chronological order. We can say that a course announcement is a 
teacher's blog devoted to a particular course. Similar to other blog applications, 
course announcements must be very easy to author, preferably any blog authoring 
tool can be applied to write such announcements. Since course announcements 
may contain very important information for course participants, and must be read 
before a particular date, there must be a variety of mechanisms that ensure 
delivering of announcements to students in time such as RSS (Really Simply 
Syndication), Atom Feed, News Groups, Emails, etc. 
 
Curriculum description. Curriculum description is a menu of documents that 
describe different aspects of actual working with the course materials and tools. 
For example, typical curriculum documents may describe a course schedule, 
course content, important prerequisites, requirements for an examination, etc. 
Curriculum documents may be authored using any tools and uploaded in a form of 
HTML, PDF, MS Office documents, etc. The most preferable way of browsing 
such curriculum documents is a selection of documents from a list (menu). It 
should be especially noted that curriculum documents may be imported from 
another University Management System. For example, the description and 
calendar of all courses are available from a so-called TU Graz Online campus 
management system in TU Graz, and from a similar system "Portal of distant 
technologies" in St.Petersburg Polytechnic University. 
 
Course library. Course library is a main learning component of any educational 
web site. The course library is a structured repository of training materials (files) 
that are available for students. Course documents can be of any format (HTML, 
PDF, PPT, movies, etc.). Normally, the course library is structured as a set of 
nested folders containing references to original documents. 
The course library must provide special tools to simplify downloading of files by 
students, thus, any mass downloading browser plug-in can be used. Since 
functionality of the course library is similar to functionality of such well-known 
cloud services as DropBox, Google Drive and MS One Drive, interface to these 
web services is desired. 
 
Course forum. The course forum is a primary asynchronous communication tool  
that allows to discuss course-related issues using an usual "Post/Reply" paradigm. 
The course forum should combine simple yet powerful text editing facilities, file 
uploading facilities and advanced data dissemination features such as "show new", 
RSS/Atom feed, email subscription, interface to news groups, etc. 
 
Course tools. Each course web site must provide references to a number of course 
specific tools such as: 
- online examination (course quiz); 
- online project (course assignment). 
A course quiz is an automatically selected list of predefined questions that must 
be answered by a particular student within a predefined time slot and possibly 
under monitoring by the teacher or course tutor. Course quizzes are evaluated 
automatically by the system or manually by the teacher and tutors. Students are 
getting examination points as a result of such evaluation. Quizzes are used as a 
part of final course examination or as a precondition for such examination. 
A course assignment is usually a set of files developed by students on request of a 
teacher. Course assignments can be done individually or in collaboration with 
other student (working group). Course assignments can be also evaluated 
automatically by the system or manually by the teacher and tutors. Similar to a 
previous case, students get points for their course assignments. 
 
COMMON EDUCATIONAL WEB SPACE 
 
On the first glance, the idea of common education WEB space may be 
implemented as a remote access for students from one university to a LMS 
residing on a server of another university. Unfortunately, this mechanism cannot 
be used in practice, courses offered by each university have significant variations 
in content and especially legal restrictions for access to the course materials, 
online examinations, doing practical assignments online, etc. Simply stated, 
teachers are creative people and must have a necessary freedom to offer students 
teaching materials and training curriculums that they find suitable for learning the 
course subject. From the legal perspective, all educational web sites must match a 
number of restrictions that are specific for a certain country and/or university. 
For example, in Austria students cannot be forced to upload their assignments 
onto a foreign server that is not a subject of Austrian law. Similarly, all the 
discussion contributions (posts) must reside on a server where university 
authorities have a full control. 
Thus, a common educational WEB space is a set of WEB sites collaborating via 
export/import functionality, web services and commonly accepted protocols. We 
distinguish two levels of such WEB sites: 
Basic level of that space is a huge collection of reusable teaching resources 
(modules) and a number of so-called laboratories. Modules from such basic level 
may be reused on an upper level that is called user level, via insert and clone 
operations (see below). Laboratories are active components that receive student's 
submissions (can be answers from a particular quiz or components of students 
assignments) and evaluates such submissions. All the communication to 
laboratories is done via web services. The most obvious way of using such 
laboratories is evaluation of programming assignments where students are 
requested to implement a programming component that is automatically compiled, 
run and evaluated by the laboratory. In this particular project, "Fortran 
Programming", "C programming", "Java Programming", "MathCAD" and 
"Database" laboratories were implemented. 
The user level may be seen as a number of LMS accessible by students. Servers 
on the user level belong to particular universities and are built for the students of 
this university. The servers functionality on the user level confirm to internal 
regulations of the university. 
 
STRUCTURING EDUCATIONAL CONTENT 
 
Courseware, according to our approach, consists of addressable components 
called modules. A module does nothing but encapsulates other components called 
members therefore, together with some internal structure (i.e. navigational 
topology). This structure is in fact a link structure expressing the relationships or 
associations between members. A member is either a document or another 
module. One member of a module is chosen and designated as its head (the 
starting point for navigation). 
Additionally, a module may have an associated document called its label (see 
Figure 1) to provide contents synopsis. If a label is missing then the head is used 
instead. 
We may think of a module as an opaque container: if we are outside the container, 
its members will not be visible to us. To see what's inside it, we must enter it. Of 
course, we can only be inside one container - the current container - at any given 
time. But once inside, we will be able to visit its members by navigating its link 
topology (see Fig. 1). 
 
Fig.1 Internal data structuring on a basic level 
A member we visit in the current container may be a document or another 
module. If a document, it will be visualized in some appropriate way - typically 
involving the presentation of the document's media objects on the computer 
display and/or sound system. If a module, its label (which is a document, by 
definition) will be visualized. The most recently visited member of the current 
container is the current member. Access to other members from the current 
member is determined by the container's internal navigational tools. 
Note that visiting (i.e. navigating to) a module does not enter it, even though its 
label is visualized. The point of the label, as mentioned earlier, is to present a 
synopsis of the module to allow us to decide whether or not we want to enter it. 
To enter it, we must explicitly use the Zoom-In operation. Zooming into a module 
makes it the new current container, its head the new current member; all links 
emanating from the current member become accessible. 
Figure 2 illustrates the Zoom-In operation. Prior to zooming in, "A" is the current 
container and "B" the current member. Applying the zoom-in operation on "B" 
makes it the current container, its head the current member, and all the links 
emanating from the head accessible. Navigation after zooming in is restricted to 
the links in the current container, or zooming into the current member (if it is a 
module) or zooming out of the current collection. 
 
 
Fig.2 Operation Zoom-In 
The Zoom-Out operation is of course the inverse of Zoom-In. Its effect is to 
restore the current container and the current member to the state immediately prior 
to the most recent zoom-in. Thus, a zoom-out operation for the situation in Figure 
2 will reinstate "A" as the current container and "B" as the current member. 
Navigation may thus be viewed as occurring in and between "planes". Link 
navigation within a module is in one plane, while the zoom-in and zoom-out 
operations are orthogonal to this and allow a jump to a lower or higher plane. 
Note also that a module may be a member of more than one other module, i.e. 
modules may be re-used in different contexts.  
Building hypermedia courseware typically follows a bottom-up approach. First, 
multimedia documents are created. They then become building blocks for 
complex modules that constitute the basic level of the system. The modules are 
encoded using a well-known SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference 
Model) format. 
 
RE-USING EDUCATIONAL CONTENT ON UPPER LEVEL 
 
Assuming that documents and modules on a basic level have been created, a 
teacher may reuse the content to incorporate it into a particular curriculum and, 
hence, make it available for students. Re-using is carried out via two different 
mechanisms - inserting elements from basic level into modules on the user level 
and cloning modules from basic level.  
Inserting elements is done using the following scenario. A teacher creates a new 
module, assigns it a unique name, selects a document or an existing module from 
a basic level as its head, and optionally selects a document as its label. Once a 
module has been created, its members - other modules or documents from the 
basic level, can be inserted, modified or removed.  
Cloning modules may be seen as selection of most suitable modules from a basic 
level and creating instances of such modules on the user level. Such instances of 
modules can be further edited as it was described above. 
 
USING DATABASE LABORATORY 
 
In this chapter we describe a couple of scenarios for actual usage of the 
"laboratory" component in teaching different aspects of database technology. The 
laboratory is an Internet server with a DataBase Management System  (DBMS) 
installation, and a number of WEB service entries for integrating the laboratory 
into other eLearning components. 
Evaluating quiz answers. 
As it was mentioned above, a course quiz is an automatically selected list of 
predefined questions that must be answered by a particular student. Thus, the 
teacher must formulate a set of questions, and possibly define templates for 
automatic evaluation of the user answers. In case of a database course, a most 
common situation is if a teacher requests to define an SQL query with a reference 
to a particular database schema. Obviously, it would be very useful to 
automatically run the query, and compare results with a predefined DBMS output 
to evaluate the student's answer. To accomplish this, teacher defines via special 
WEB services: 
 a database schema and test content for a special database application; 
 a number of SQL queries, each query is recorded along with an expected 
correct query definition.  
As a student formulates an answer (provides a source query code), it is 
automatically submitted to the laboratory via a web-service, executed and the 
output is compared to a test output. All the results are returned to the teacher.  
Working with database assignments. 
In this case, a student or a working group of students gets a named space in the 
laboratory where the following actions can be performed via a web-service:  
 a database schema may be defined and compiled;  
 test database content may be inserted into the database;  
 a number of queries can be formulated and executed in the context of the 
previously defined database.  
Teachers may request a working protocol of a particular group. The protocol 
includes all the sources defined by the students and the results of execution of 
the queries (see Fig.3). Thus, the students assignment may be easily evaluated.  
This mode is primary used for doing students projects - sample database 
applications.  
 
Fig.3 Application of a database laboratory  
 
REFERENCES: 
[1] M.Ebner, N.Scerbakov, H. Maurer "New Features for eLearning in Higher 
Education for Civil Engineering", Springer Journal of Universal Science 
and Technology of Learning, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 93 – 106 (2006) 
[2] A.Scerbakov, N.Scerbakov, M.Ebner "Using Cloud Services in a Modern 
Learning Management System", Journal of Computing and Information 
Technology 03/2015; 23(1):75-86. (2015) 
[3] N.Scerbakov "TU Graz Teach-Center", Available:  
http://tugtc.tugraz.at/wbtmaster/welcome.html  (2015) 


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