WebCMS: A Web-based Course Management System Ong Siew Siew School of Computer Science & Engineering University of New South Wales UNSW Sydney 2052, Australia ssong@cse.unsw.edu.au John Shepherd School of Computer Science & Engineering University of New South Wales UNSW Sydney 2052, Australia jas@cse.unsw.edu.au Abstract This paper describes the development of and initial expe- riences with WebCMS (a web-based course management system), a learning management system developed in the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). The system was developed to facilitate existing CSE practices and over- come limitations of existing CSE course management tools, but has evolved into a generic on-line course management platform. It also provides some insight into what can be achieved towards on-line learning by a single programmer using a collection of open-source tools. 1. Introduction The School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has a large student enrolment. Classes typically contain more than 300 students (and up to 900 in large first year classes). Admin- istering and assessing such large classes is a daunting task. Over the last decade, CSE has developed a loosely- integrated collection of Unix-based tools [2] to assist in managing these large classes. SMS (Student Management System) maintains class lists and provides a gradebook, a report generator, and a marks finalisation system. The Give system allows students to submit work (typically program- ming projects) online and have the submissions run through a set of pre-determined test cases. The Xmark system allows tutors to assess student submissions, and feed the assess- ment results back into SMS. The Sirius system allows stu- dents to choose which tutorials and laboratory classes they wish to attend. Since around 1995, it has also been routine for each CSE course to maintain a web site containing a bulletin board (for administrative notices) as well as course materials such as lecture notes. While SMS/Give/Sirius and the Web site combine to give an online presence for each course, there are a num- ber of problems with this approach that make it less than ideal. The problems include limited integration of systems, high maintenance cost, low accessibility off-campus, etc. One aim of this work was to provide a single system that could overcome these problems, yet not disrupt existing CSE teaching practices substantially. In the next section, we detail the problems in the exist- ing CSE systems and explain why we implemented our own database-backed web solution to overcome them. Section 3 provides an overview of the functionality of the WebCMS system. Section 4 gives details of WebCMS’s software ar- chitecture. Section 5 describes our experiences with us- ing the system thus far. Section 6 concludes what we have learned from this exercise and suggests directions for future development of the system. 2. Background CSE course web sites are created using a variety of ap- proaches, e.g. manually editing HTML using text or HTML editors, web authoring programs (e.g. Dreamweaver) or even commercial Web course development tools (e.g. We- bCT [9]) depending on lecturer’s background, experience and interest. A typical CSE course web site contains the course outline, notice board, lecture notes, assignments, projects, staff information, links to external resources etc. There is no standard for the structure of the course web site (although a course outline is required). However, a de facto standard for the course web sites has emerged (based on [6]). Maintaining course web sites is a relatively tedious and time-consuming task, even with an HTML editor. The SMS system also has a high maintenance cost, because it uses a snapshot of the central university enrolments database which has to be manually downloaded. The use of a snap- shot is also bad from the database consistency point of view (for example, at the end of each semester lecturers are required to manually remove all students from their SMS databases who are no longer officially enrolled in their Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA’02) 1529-4188/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE