Diplek: An Open LMS that Supports Fast Composition of Educational Services - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 65

Documentation and Help • Communication between learners and

instructors

As with any other software, users are satisfied by
it when an adequate and well written documenta-
tion is available (Sacha, 2006). Moreover, in a
LMS that can be used by non computer literate
users, help must be available at any stage of the
learning process. This help is translated to (Som-
merville, 2002):

• Adaptation - Personalization - Extensibility

• People Grouping and General course

Coordination

• Monitoring learners' achievements and

progress during a course

In the next sections, further explanation and
analysis is made of each group of services along
with state of the art of LMSs available in the
educational community.

• Printed manual for the whole software

• Included Help files that are linked and ac-

cessible by the current user

Communication Between
Learners and Instructors

• On line Help

CURRENT STATE Most LMS contain tools for conducting conver-

sations. Naturally these rely to a great extent on
e-mail and message exchange. It is important
to consider how well the learning environment
leverages messaging technology to support the
conversation as an integral part of learning (Britain
& Liber, 1999). For example, a good conversation
tool should be accessible directly from the learn-
ing topic within the course structure and the user
should not have to move out of the course work
in order to continue the conversation. One should
take into consideration whether the communica-
tion tool allows attachments to be included within
messages, and if so, whether the attachments can
be extracted and embedded into the user's personal
folder or portfolio.
Another key point is whether the service allows
learning goals to be specified and recorded during
a conversation. Ideally the agreed learning goal
should be in a prominent location with respect to
the topic of learning. Some of the most popular
communication tools are integrated email clients,
forums and live chat rooms. These exist in many
LMS platforms.
A good example is the COSE LMS (http://
www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/) that was developed dur-
ing a research project at Staffordshire University.
COSE supports email, forums and chat tools. All

A variety of LMSs have already been adopted
by educational institutes worldwide; some prefer
free and open source solutions while others rely
on proprietary software solutions that come with
guaranteed support and helpdesk. The need for
standardization led a lot of community developers
to pursue a way to standardize most of the LMS
services. The results of these efforts are reflected
in: (a) the available standards of e- Learning archi-
tecture (e.g. the IEEE LTSA, Learning Technolo-
gies Standard Architecture), (b) the description
of learning objects meta-data based on shareable
XML-based data structures (e.g. through the IEEE
LOM specification) and (c) the assessment and
evaluation of user performance (e.g. through the
IMS QTI, Question and Testing Interoperability
Schemas). The above specifications enable the
common description of learning units, questions
and tests, learner profiles, etc, so that they can be
easily interchanged between different applications
(Sampson, Karagiannidis & Cardinali, 2002).
A further study of the above specifications
led to four main categories of services a LMS
should offer to its users. These categories include
services for: