Introduction

"Easy to install - easy to use."

is a free (GPL: Gnu General Public License) e-education package to facilitate the design and presentation of electronic lectures. It has evolved from the presentation of courses in a university environment. Different from other (predominantly commercial) e-learning systems, is an individual solution; usually it is installed for individual courses by the lecturer or course administrator and direct, uncomplicated access to the features and contents of the course is possible.

The guiding idea was to build a modular system that is simple to install and use for lecturers, who have some familiarity with writing web-documents (with html-editors or directly as html-code) but are not experts in web-software. It is easily possible to insert and combine existing web-documents. However, it is also possible to include other types of documents, either by linking to them as usual in web pages, or through a working area available to course users.

From version 2.0 onwards we have included collaborative tools like e.g. a discussion forum or a user file space in order to allow project oriented communication between the students.

Here are the main features:

The lecturer

• writes for the content part lecture units as standard html-documents (i.e. may use any html-editor for preparation of the units); this may provide an ordered path through the material. Alternatively one could organize the course by table-of-contents-like tree structure and use other document formats (like MS-Word or PDF files); these will not be inter-linked internally as the html files are.

• uses certain special commands embedded in the documents in order to provide correct
  • internal links to other lecture units
  • links to separate external URLs
  • links to special exercises (in form of other html-documents)

• may easily modify the main features of the presentation environment (like titles, colors, font styles, menus) in one list of parameters

• may conveniently change the language for the students' access

• may interactively insert, delete and modify exercise pages

• may simply modify any of the lecture html-documents without affecting the running system

• may interactively combine the units for production of a print file document (e.g. lecture notes)

• can control the students' access with help of a userid/password system including user application forwarding and group structuring

• may arrange for collaborative groups of students

• may follow the progress of the student via simple calls to an SQL-data base (realized via html-pages)

• can set up and manage a discussion forum, a chatbox and a user file space for collaborative learning

The students

• read and work with the lecture interactively via any web browser

• may add their comments to all lecture units

• evaluate the self-controlling exercises online

• may print individual documents of lecture-prepared notes

• may work in collaborative working groups and exchange or publish files in a userspace "Filedepot"

• can contribute to a discussion forum (or in the chatbox) on topics of the course

• can easily mail to their peers within the students' groups

Individual extensions

Since simple usage is our prime concern. We do not provide many extensions to evaluate the users' (students') behavior. Some statistics features are included and discussed in the FAQs. It is also possible to provide menu-links to further external features like visualization tools, external chat-boxes etc.

Authors

Christian B. Lang is professor of theoretical physics at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria.

Thomas C. Lang is a student of physics at Technische Universität Graz, Austria, and has experience in commercial web-design.

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