A web Application

In this part of the assignment, you are required to develop a small-scale online learning management system that can be used to deliver online courses to learners. To that end, you will have to think about what these online courses are, how they can they be developed and how they should be stored on the web server, how they can be retrieved from the server, how they should be delivered to a web browser, and then rendered/presented properly on the web browser. The development of online courses is the collaboration of efforts of subject matter experts (SMEs) and experts in computing and web technology. It is very common that those SMEs do not know much about computing, and don’t know how to use HTML and other web technologies needed to present an attractive course, but they should be quite comfortable with languages and terms used in education. So, the first technical step you need to take is to design a SME-friendly language for marking up educational materials, EML in our term (just another XML like you created for marking up your resume), for the SMEs to use. The EML you design may be a comprehensive one for marking up the contents for an entire course, or several languages in small scale for different components of a course. For example, you may have an EML for a lesson/lecture delivered in just a teaching/learning session, an EML for marking up quizzes, and an EML for marking up assignments, etc. You may look at some existing languages by searching for educational markup language in Google or other search engine. After SMEs (for this assignment, you will be the SME) have written the course contents in your EML(s), the documents must be stored on the server before they can be delivered to the learners on the web. You may think that you can save each of the documents written in your EML as a file, like the resume file you wrote for assignment 1, but this is not practical. Files may work when there is just one or only a few learning documents, butwhen there are many, as happens in practical situations, the documents become unmanageable. That's why we need a database. The next technical step is to design the database table or tables. Over the years, I have seen different designs from students in the course. The most simple and straightforward one is to have a single table. In the table each row contains information for a lesson or quiz, including the actual content written in your EML. To make the learning contents retrievable and manageable, you will need fields to identify the course and the unit the lesson or quiz belongs to. You may also keep the details of the courses and units in the same table for the purpose of this assignment project, though you wouldn't do that in practice because it is really inefficient; in a real world situation is to have separate tables to store information about courses and units.