IVLE HOME HCI BACKGROUND

  The Integrated Virtual Learning Environment

The Integrated Virtual Learning Environment (IVLE for short) is a courseware management system designed and developed by the Wizlearn Pte Ltd,. to manage and support teaching, learning and courseware management over the Internet. Aside from facilitating the organization of course materials on the web, IVLE also provides a wide variety of tools and resources that can be added to a course. Supplementing classroom teaching of more than 2,400 courses and reaching some 28,000 students, IVLE provides tools for discussion forums, online chat, auto marked quizzes, class distribution lists, electronic mail, course faq builders, lesson plans, automatic index generation, staff homepages, course calendar, subscription services, assignment repositories, templates and much more.

The primary benefit of IVLE is access to up-to-date course materials for our students working on campus, at home, or while traveling. IVLE also enables instructors to expand the range of materials they can make available to students, enhance communications, save time for themselves and their assistants, and help students to better prepare for class. IVLE is a cost-effective vehicle for doing all this largely because of its close integration with the University's Exchange messaging engine and its design philisophy of ensuring all tools and resources are web-based and leveraging its authentication against NUS single user-ID and password.

Our interest in IVLE

To provide collaborative, teaching and learning tools and resources that are used by teaching staff to
  1. communicate and correspond with students
  2. supplement the classroom experience
  3. provide a consistent interface to students and visitors on courses conducted at NUS
  4. enrich and broaden the students' learning experience
  5. provide utilities related to teaching and learning processes.
Our implementation of IVLE

IVLE operates in an environment of three Windows 2000 Servers running in the same domain. One of them serves as the IVLE web server by hosting IVLE applications on Internet Information Server 5.0. Another server runs Microsoft SQL Server 2000 serving as the IVLE backend database system. The third server serves as a course website server by hosting staff's courseware materials on Internet Information Server 5.0 as well.

The IVLE web server runs on an IBM Netfinity 7100 server with Dual-CPU and 1.28GB memory. The database server runs on an IBM Netfinity 7600 server with Quad-CPU and 3GB memory. The course website server runs on a Compaq Proliant 6000 server with Dual-CPU and 1GB memory. A total of 180 GB harddisk space is available on these three servers to store course information, courseware tools and resources in use by both staff and students.

The primary programming language used to develop IVLE is Active Server Pages, VB Components and Javascript.

Case Study on IVLE

Read about Microsoft's case study on IVLE.