Design of School Content Management Framework: INFORMATION, Japan February 2013
Design of School Content Management Framework: INFORMATION, Japan February 2013
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* College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nora Bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh
Abstract
The Content Management System (CMS) becomes an important technology in any educational
portal that will be used for organizing and facilitating collaborative construction of contents within a
consistent framework. The CMSs have a wide range of features that will satisfy the school
communication needs between students, faculty, administration, and community that are well served
by dynamic web sites. Consequently, the primary goal of this work is designing an appropriate
framework for the School Content Management System (SCMS). This system adopts CMS features
for creating, editing, organizing, and publishing content relating to different schools' activities. These
activities include school administrative works, course management, and classroom management. We
applied the Web Engineering Method (WEM) which combining the characteristics of UML based
Web-engineering (UWE) and the Unified Software Development Process (UP), a method used for
situational development of CMS-based Web applications.
Key Words: CMS, WEM, UWE, UP.
1. Introduction
The Internet is the most powerful information media. Dynamic and effective website
becomes an essential component for any institution. A few years ago, the administration of
website such as updating, or adding new contents needs assistance from IT companies or web
designer. Today with a few skills in computer, it is easy for users to create and manage their
websites. The CMS application allows nontechnical users to manage a comprehensive website.
It used for creating, editing, organizing, and publishing content of the website. There are many
benefits of this technology for the educational institutions to communicate with their students
and outside community.
The use of CMS makes the school's activities become more reliable and easy to perform. It
should support schools from the following perspectives: Communication, CMS will enhance
the communication between students and school faculty. The dynamic website keeps up the
communication with coursework while away from the school and the forum modules provide an
online interaction where students and teachers can discuss course materials, as well as events at
the school. Usability, CMS for schools should be facilitating the tasks to optimize a user’s time
spent in managing their website. Determining the appropriate utilization of modules, menus,
managers, the visual design and physical place of the interface elements can improve the user’s
capability to navigate successfully through the tasks. Content Publishing, the CMS should be
made easy to publish and manage all school contents. School contents refer to the textual and
multimedia contents that exchanged inside the school environment. Furthermore, schools need
specific modules that serve the educational activities for the school's community. For example,
Course Management which provides a full range of features to help teachers planning and
managing the course contents. As well as, it assists students to conduct online learning. In
addition to, Classroom Management which encourages the alternative collaborative learning. It
provides features including modules for assignments, chat, forums, and quizzes.
There are a lot of CMSs in the market, some of them released as an open-source software.
Unfortunately, many systems have more functionality and most of them useless modules for the
school community. The huge number of functionalities complexes the use of these systems and
they become not user-friendly for nontechnical persons. In addition, other systems miss the
essential functions that needed to handle school activities such as course and classroom
modules. Of course, some of them provide an opportunity to add customized features or
integrate with other systems, which offer some features needed for educational systems.
However, the school faculty in most cases misses the technical skills that required to
understand these features. These reasons orient the CMS users to establish a customized CMS
which satisfy their needs through easy and direct interface. The contribution of this paper is the
design of CMS Framework for schools. It determines the fundamental requirements that should
be offered by CMS that serve the school community and should be fulfilled the above
perspectives.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the literature review.
Section 3 defines the problem statement of this research. Section 4 presents the framework
development and describes the key functions of SCMS. Section 5 discusses some issues related
to the proposed framework. Finally, a conclusion of this paper in Section 6.
2. Literature Review
This research has been studying the existing CMSs and investigated some experiences of
schools which already migrated for using CMSs to manage their websites. As well as, it
reviewed the literatures that related to managing the school website's contents.
2.1 Examples of Web Content Management Systems
At the beginning of this section, we will provide an overview of the two popular open-
source CMSs that can be used to manage the school's website.
1. Joomla, which is considered the most powerful CMS. It is very widely used by users and
includes many features, which allow users to create a website and manage their content. Joomla
established JoomSchools which is a reasonable CMS that provides both primary and secondary
schools with the ability to modify their websites. There are thousands of functions that can be
used for school. The standard package includes modules such as email, calendar, document
manager, file Repository, menu. Besides, optional modules such as room and resource online
booking, e-Learning (LMS), and discussion Forum [28].
2. Drupal, which is used to create the personal blogs, as well as, enterprise applications. It
includes thousands of add-on modules that assist to build any website. It recently incorporates
the school administration module that responsible for storing information of students, faculty
and non-academic staff. This module enables parents to view information of their kids. It
contains some other modules for managing classes, lessons, class lists, and rooms booking
[26].
3. Problem Statement
All schools in Saudi Arabia's educational system already used computerized management
system to achieve school administrative functions, and most of school have its own website to
publish school information. The website has extremely limited or out-of-date information.
Typically, school website contains only general information that is updated each semester. If
data from the management system wants to be published on the web, it should be manually
transmitted to the website by website designer such as grading result at the end of semester.
Additionally, teachers and students are missing the effective interaction. Teachers cannot
upload their course materials on the website while the students cannot use it for supporting
their learning. Furthermore, parents lack the ability to follow up their child's learning progress
or check their attendance. Consequently, these systems loosely comply with the current school
needs. In order to address the above problems, this paper proposes the use of CMS solutions,
which have a wide range of features that will satisfy the school community needs. Using CMS
in schools ranges from managing school activities and creating teacher blogs, to extended
community discussion forums, to online course offerings. We aim to design framework of
SCMS that satisfy school needs and present required functions through user-friendly interface.
4. System Development
The next step is the selection of the methodology-which will apply of the framework design.
There are several approaches have been proposed in the field of web engineering. Though, the
CMS is an application which merges the Web technology and manages the unstructured data.
The existing approaches for the requirements engineering of web applications fail to implement
the CMS system [19]. We apply the engineering method developed specifically for CMS-based
Web applications which built by merging components of two methods: UML-based Web
Engineering (UWE) and the Unified Software Development Process (UP). This Engineering
Method (WEM) proposed by Souer in [16, 19] and it was applied successfully in several cases
for WCM systems [16].
√
Content authors Parents
(authorized teachers & Staff)
School Website
Web visitors
Approvers
(authorized teachers & Staff)
Database
System Administrators
WCMS
Fig. 1: System Architecture for SCMS.
According to the objective and the design principle, the SCMS framework should include the
following main functions: system and members manager, web pages manager, module manager,
file manager, page editor, and template editor. The function modules diagram of the proposed
framework shown below in Figure. 2.
School Administration
Course
Classrooms
E-mail
Template Editor
Chat room
Forums
Menus
Upload file ? No
Start Yes
User Rights ? No
Sign In
Yes
No Add file
User Rights ?
information
View Yes
categories
Upload files
View files
No
Approval ?
No Yes
file exist ?
Publish
Yes
Yes
Edit file
More files ?
No
End
2. School Administration module. School resources and records management are daily
functions for school administration staff. Records for students, faculty and non-academic staff
intended to store in the central database server. Student records keep general information,
attendance, and medical records, as well as, grading information. The authorized users can
access these records with no restriction of time or place. They are responsible for adding a new
record and updating existing record information. These records used to generate reports and
perform statistical analysis. Parent can monitor their child's learning progress. Additionally,
faculty and non-academic staff records include general information, contact numbers, and
qualification. Through this module, faculty members can create personal web pages or blogs to
publish their news and external information related to teaching courses. The business process
model for student record management presented in Figure 4. Furthermore, this module handles
room reservation which responsible for assigning rooms to subjects in the school's schedule and
determining teacher who will conduct this lecture.
Start
Sign In
No
User Rights ?
Yes
No
New student ?
Yes
Verify student No
data ?
Yes
Save student
record
Yes
More students ?
No
End
3. Course Module. Authorized teachers can create a new course or modify existing one. This
process includes adding the basic information about the course, course index, course contents,
polices, grading system, and calendar events. The course contents can be added from the files
repository which are uploaded to the system from file manager. The following process is the
course content approval and publishing which accomplished by authorized staff. The business
process model for course module presented in Figure 5.
Start No
New Course ?
Sign In Yes
No
User Rights ?
No
User Rights ? Yes
No
Course exist ?
Create course
Yes Index
Course Index No
exist ?
Yes Add content
View index
contents
Course content No
exist ? Yes
Edit content Approval ?
Yes
No
Publish
content
Yes
More content ?
No
End
4. Classroom Module. New classroom object can be created and managed through this
module. Students who belong to one classroom should be added to a classroom object.
Classroom module intended to support different class activities. It manages the learning
resources and teaching activities. The learning resources include learning materials in any
format and teaching activities, which include a bulletin board, learning record, quizzes,
assignments, homework and announcement [14]. Additionally, Chat for each classroom should
be configured to support teachers and students interaction. In addition to, messages
broadcasted to classroom members. All these functions added to the classroom page using their
modules that mentioned above. Each classroom administrated by class manger (specific
teacher) who is responsible for managing classroom activities. The business process model for
classroom is shown below in Figure 6.
Start
Sign In
New classroom No
?
No Yes
User Rights ?
User rights ? No
Input
Yes
Classroom id
Yes
No
Content exist? Add contents
Yes
Select
Edit Contents
Contents
No Approval ?
Yes
Yes
More content ? Publish content
No
End
5. Test Module. This module allows teachers to incorporate quizzes as classroom activities.
Different templates and categories of the test should be offered as well as an automatic
mechanism for grading student's answers. The business process model for test module is shown
below in Figure 7.
Start
Sign In
No
User Rights ?
Yes
Enter Test id
No
Enter Test
description
Choose Test
Templates
Add content
Yes No
Approval ?
Edit content
Publish content
End
5. Discussion
This research studied the essential requirements for WCM system that suitable for managing
school web sites. The school's activities decomposed into a set of coherent functions. The
principal functions should be implemented in separated modules, which help nontechnical
persons such as teachers to use it in a few easy steps. For example, the course module which
provides a full range of features. It will help teachers to build and organize course's contents.
They can add this module to the webpage and follow a set of steps to produce a full course
contents. Classroom module, which provides a collaborative learning. It offers features
including modules for assignments, chat, forums, and quizzes. In addition to, the test module
which allows test creation in different formats and provides automatic grading scheme which
helps teacher easily to assess the student's learning. These modules integrate the learning
management system features into the web content management to produce SCMS framework
that fulfills the school requirements. Furthermore, the school administration module which is
handling the daily works in the school. It is responsible for handling records of student and
staff, as well as, organizing different school resources. The school environment is different
from any other organization from educational and pedagogical aspects. These aspects should be
taken into consideration when designing WCM framework for schools. The rest of functions
contained in this framework is shared with other WCM systems. These functions provide
website creation and content development as well as to offer communications tools.
6. Conclusion
A flexible framework for school content management system was presented in this paper
based on the study of school requirements. This framework aims to support content
management and activities accomplishment. It provides an efficient management process that
needed to construct and manage website contents. Additionally, it offers special modules that
incorporate educational and pedagogical features to this framework. These features represent
the main difference between WCM system that appropriate for the school environment and
other general WCM systems. Finally, we plan as a continuation of this research to present an
implementation for the proposed framework.
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