Online Learning Space

1
Online Learning Space

• Advisor Dr. Stewart Shen
• Student Li Zhao
• April 24, 2006

2
Online Learning Space

• Objectives
• Introduction
• Features
• Application Description
• Conclusions

3
Objective

• To Simulate the Learning Space that can be used
  for web-based class as well as traditional
  classes.
• To achieve the following learning objectives
• To gain hands on experience with working on a
  whole project independently, from system design,
  development, to testing, maintenance and
  deployment.
• To get more familiar and work more efficiently
  with .NET framework.
• To get more experience with database design and
  maintenance from working on SQL Server 2000.
• To gain more experience on error handling skills
  of .NET programming.
• To practice and gain more hands-on experience on
  user-friendly interface design.

4
Online Learning Space

• It is a role-based web application.
• It supports at least three roles instructor,
  student and administrator. (can set more roles
  e.g. teaching assistant)
• Main functionalities
• For student assignment submission, view course
  topics, communicate with other class members
  using forum or message.
• For instructor class management including
  assignment posting, grading submissions, posting
  topics, create class event.
• For administrator system maintenance including
  setting users, role, maintain pages, modules and
  page layout.

5
Introduction

• Course Management
• Assignments
• Submissions
• Topics
• Events

• System Maintenance
• Users
• Roles
• Pages
• Modules
• Page Layout
• System Setting Refresh

6
Introduction

• System environment Microsoft IIS 5.1, Microsoft
  .NET Framework 1.1
• Development tools Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
  2003, Microsoft SQL server 2000
• Languages C, JavaScript, HTML

7
Features

• System Security
• Forms authentication
• Role-based security
• System performance
• Ease of maintenance

8
Features system security

• Forms Authentication
• Ask users for credentials login name
  password.
• In Web.config, define the login page URL and any
  unauthorized access will be redirected to this
  URL.
• The login page will call a local authenticating
  method to query database and check the validity
  of the username and password.
• If it returns true, then the login is successful,
  ASP.NET then issues the user an authentication
  ticket in the form of a cookie and redirects the
  user to the page originally requested.
• The lifetime of the session can be defined in
  web.config file. If the session is expired, any
  page visits will be redirected to login page
  again.
• When user logs out, system will call
  System.Web.Security.FormsAuthentication.SignOut
  method that signs out a user. It destroys the
  authentication cookie by setting the cookies
  value to a null string and setting the cookies
  expiration date to a date in the past.

9
Features system security

• Role-based security
• Role-based security is implemented by good
  database design.
• All pages are grouped into different modules in
  module_page table.
• Another table named role_module keeps the
  accessibility of different roles to different
  modules.
• After user login is authenticated, the user role
  will be retrieved from database and kept as a
  session variable.
• A role-pages hash table is created.
• If a user tries to access an unauthorized page,
  the system will redirect to a page that telling
  the user the access is denied.

10
Features System performance

• System settings, such as page and page security
  information, are retrieved from database and
  saved into hash tables to improve system
  performance.
• Example mechanism to get the role menus
• Pages are grouped into modules, and some pages
  are menu page.
• Set module accessibility for each role.
• Retrieve database to get role-menu pages hash
  table and pageId-name hashtable.
• Menu for each role will get from the two
  hashtables without access DB each time one page
  is loaded.
• System settings are refreshed only when user
  login or when the Refresh cached settings
  button is clicked in the maintenance module.

11
Features - ease of maintenance

• Menu/page Maintenance
• Captions and orders of menu items can be changed
  easily by update related menu page information.
• Active/inactive status
• Assignments, topics and events are all have
  active/inactive status. Advantage?
• Keep frequently referenced object in AppSetting
  in web.config, e.g., file upload path, error log
  path, Database connection string etc.

12
Features - ease of maintenance

• Page layout template Easily change the outlook
  of the whole site.
• Page template files for normal form page and
  popup page are created and uploaded into the
  specified path.
• The template files has some general Tags, such
  as, PageLayoutItem, PageLayoutApplicationPath,
  pageLayoutContent.
• These tags are interpreted by the page layout
  class of application.
• Page.xxx, Session.xxx, and Application.xxx will
  be referenced to page hashtable object, session
  object, and application object.
• PageLayoutApplicationPath will be replaced with
  Web application path.
• PageLayoutContents will call asp.net Render
  method to render aspx page contents.

13
Features - page layout template
14
Features - page layout template
15
Features Page layout template

• ltPageLayoutItemgtPage.Namelt/PageLayoutItemgt
• ltPageLayoutItemgtSession.Menult/PageLayoutItemgt
• ltimg src'ltPageLayoutApplicationPathgt/Image/book.g
  if' border0 width48 height49gt
• lttrgtlttdgtltPageLayoutContentsgtlttdgtlt/trgt

16
Online Learning Space

• Application Description

17
System Maintenance page list
18
System Maintenance role-module-page
19
System Maintenance - users
20
System Maintenance user edit
21
Course management - Assignments

• Assignment - list assignments, create, update and
  delete one assignment, view files.

22
Course management Assignment edit
23
Course management - Submissions
24
Assignments page for students
25
Course management - Topics
26
Topics page for students
27
Course management - Event
28
Event
29
Forum
30
Forum
31
Message
32
Message edit
33
Conclusions

• It is a role-based web application with good
  system security.
• It provides flexible maintenance module for both
  administrator and instructor.
• It provides integrate document management
  functionalities including document uploading,
  viewing, deleting.
• It has good communications tools including forum
  and message exchange.
• This system can be extended to serve multiple
  courses and can be easily deployed on any
  machine with windows web service - IIS.
• Most important I gained much experience with
  .Net programming and working independently on
  project.

34
Future work

• To support FTP File upload feature
• To support search functionality in Forum
• Other more

35
Thank you!
Acknowledgement Dr. Shen has given me valuable
instructions on this project. I also want to
thank him for the patience he showed while I
worked on this long-time project.