September 2005 — Features
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Dissecting a Network-Based Education System
Teacher-created lesson plan information is provided for administrators and designated school system contacts. The first interface allows administrators to search for approved lesson plans by title, the lesson plan’s author, or the author’s school or school system. The results list the school, school system, name, and user name for each approved lesson plan. A second interface is designed for school system contacts. In addition to approved lesson plans, submitted lesson plans are included in this report.
MarcoPolo reports are available to users with administrative privileges. From this screen, administrators can view alignment information. They can search by user name or enter a date range, and get results that include lesson plans that were aligned by the given user or during the given date range.
Future Work
It’s the mission of network-based education systems like ALEX to exploit modern-day technology and encourage resource sharing among educational institutions. Specifically, the ALEX system is an effort to encourage Alabama’s K-12 education community to improve education by pooling its resources. The ALEX system also continues to grow as lesson plans from NASAexplores (www.NASAexplores.com) will soon be aligned to courses of study content standards. Expansion has been built into the ALEX system, so as long as teachers continue to find the education system helpful, they will continue to contribute teacher-created lesson plans, variations to teacher-created lesson plans, and Web resources. The more resources available on the system, the more valuable the system will become to the Alabama K-12 education community.
Other future work entails adding different types of valuable lesson plans and resources that are similar to the ones from MarcoPolo and NASAexplores. An ongoing duty of maintaining the ALEX system is implementing suggested improvements from users to make the education system easier to use. One suggestion is to improve the response time of the system so that users get faster search results; however, as more and more people use the system, the servers experience increasing workloads. Another suggestion is to redesign the built-in error-checking JavaScript features on the main search page. Initially included to increase the probability that useful search results would be returned, users feel these features slow the search process down. Future research will involve the evaluation of more network-based education systems for ideas on how the ALEX system can be improved in other ways.
Tiffany Davis is a computer engineer for Computer Sciences Corp. in Montgomery, AL. She works with the Alabama Supercomputer Authority to provide technical solutions to the state’s education community. Seong-Moo Yoo is an associate professor and Wendi (David) Pan is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
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