Author: Richard Tunstall, rtunstal@glam.ac.uk

JISC e-Learning Activity Area: Technology-enhanced Learning Environments

Higher Education Academy Subject Centre: Business, Management, Accountancy and Finance

This case study illustrates...use of specialist software, an effect on learning, an effect on student personal development, student satisfaction with e-learning, innovation in learning and teaching, staff satisfaction with e-learning, use of gaming/simulation

Technology Used

What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you?

The intention was to develop a tool that students could access through the internet. The University of Glamorgan uses the Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment as the standard platform through which students engage in blended learning materials, so for this reason the intention was to use Blackboard as the platform for accessing the specific tool. As students enrol onto specific 'Courses' within Blackboard to access materials for individual modules, this had the added benefit of allowing us to restrict access to the specific targeted students, while also allowing us to gain basic access statistics to gauge the amount of times the tool was accessed and dates of access by individual students.

As no existing development tools were available, the tool itself (known as 'Tileworld') was developed from scratch by the in-house multimedia development manager. The application was created using Flash, and was designed using an object-oriented approach so that subsequent projects (3 at the moment) could add to and reuse the range of functionality developed. Flash was chosen as we wanted to create a web-based application which could work on fairly low-spec equipment but could integrate with a variety of web-based learning systems. The scripting language used by Flash, ActionScript, is becoming increasingly sophisticated and allows for the object-oriented approach we wished to adopt. Data for the content and functionality is held in a series of customisable XML documents allowing for easy editing of the content and subsequent projects use a MySQL/PHP combination to store and retrieve user data.