IT development, the more and more popular access to the Internet and variety of tools enabling using it in the field of teaching (Nedeva, 2005), encourage many educational institutions and companies to expand their offers with e-learning courses (Daku, 2009, Dobrzański&Brom&Brytan, 2007). Owing to that, quicker access to knowledge and learning costs reduction can be achieved. Course materials can be studied by the employees or students at a convenient time and place, which gives them a chance to equalize possibilities of getting an education.
However, when using the available e-learning tools, two problems are observable.
- So far, usage of e-learning platforms is limited to theory presentation and exchange of teaching materials, whereas, in some knowledge branches - especially in the field of technical science - teaching practical usage of theory, experience achieved in real environments and learning from one’s own mistakes play an important role. Current functionality of e-learning platforms does not provide such possibilities.
- Second problem results from asynchronous type of learner-teacher communication, which makes both sides dependent on their mutual activity. Solutions of complex problems are usually more extensive than just a yes/no answer. It should be taken into consideration that very often many aspects of the solution should be analyzed, which can have a massive effect on delays in remote communication. Thus, an automatic estimation of solutions inconvenience should be introduced.
Dealing with the aforementioned problems will enrich and make teaching process more effective on various levels of education. What is more, in many cases, capabilities of tools, supporting e-learning are higher than only knowledge presentation and make elimination of described inconveniences possible.
Because, one of the most popular and free environments for e-learning is Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment [MOODLE] (MOODLE Home Page –Statistics, Braccini&Silvestri&Za&D'Atri, 2009), it was used in the research in order to extend it with the new mechanisms.
MOODLE course management allows teachers to build their courses in an optimal way for their learners and subject matter. The platform capabilities include many different mechanisms – i.e. activities, giving trainees possibility to test and to resolve given problems in practice and passive resources, allowing the knowledge presentation. The Open Source distributed MOODLE environment, has the specific (i.e. modular) organization. Besides, it cooperates with a database server – one of the following can be used: MySQL, PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server (MOODLE Home Page – About MOODLE). This features caused, it was very suitable tool for introducing new mechanisms to a group of already existing activities. Due to the fact, in previous papers (Harężlak&Werner, 2009; Harężlak&Werner, 2010), the MOODLE module structure was explained in details, now only the key issues will be described.
After installing the whole environment (i.e. Apache Server, PHP and chosen database server), all MOODLE courses modules, such as: chat, forum, glossary, lesson, quiz, etc, are placed in one folder /www/mod of WAMP server installation path1. Every module has its separate folder of a corresponding name and the similar structure. The most important - and obligatory in each folder - files, are: mod_form.php and view.php. First file is responsible for a contents of page seen by a teacher during editing an activity, while second one - for contents of page seen by course participants during executing an activity. Thus, the new module implementation is in practice reduced to creating a new folder with a known structure, and to providing the desired functionality of component files by the PHP or Java Script coding.
Taking the important role of XML language in the exchange of a wide variety of data into consideration, the new custom XML mechanisms were developed in order to make the completion of educational tasks possible.
Therefore tasks (activities) with a different exercise level of difficulty were prepared in a module. Among them, two groups can be enumerated. First of them consists of simple operations on an XML file:
- creating a simple XML document,
- analysing of an XML file content,
- inserting a single row of data and loading data from an XML file.
In the second one, more complex tasks, regarding database mechanisms for XML data management, are considered:
- designing and creating database structures,
- dedicated to XML data collecting, building XML schemas and assigning them to the database structures,
- retrieving relational data as XML and querying XML data with usage of advanced methods.
The chapter will present novel mechanisms guaranteeing comprehensive, interactive XML language learning.
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