The Usefulness of the Functionalities of the Distance Education Electronic Portal

Hanafi Atan, School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia

Abstract
This article reports on the study undertaken to elucidate the extent of the usefulness of the functionalities of the e-learning portal developed as a part of the academic support system in the teaching and learning at the School of Distance Education (SDE), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia. A total of four functionalities namely the Announcement, Learning Activities, Communication and General Support System of the portal that consisted of eleven sub-features were studied. These features were the general bulletin, staff directory, links, info on study programmes, video conferencing schedule, and course information, past examination papers, assignment questions, forum board, course notices, and e-mail. Out of the features studied, information on the study programmes was the main features visited and utilized by the students followed by the course information features and to a lesser extent by the assignment questions, and past examination paper. The features that were least visited and utilized by the student were the e-mail, staff directory, links and the video conferencing schedule. The effect in terms of the future designs of the e-learning portal that conform to the need and usefulness to the distance learners the will be discussed and elaborated

INTRODUCTION
The advances of information and communication technology (ICT) have led to the development of the online based e-learning portal, often called the Learning Management System (LMS). In open and distance learning (ODL), the e-learning portal is often utilised as a part of the academic support system to supplement the main print-based modular format of the course delivery. The main operational features of the LMS is that such a system is integrated with the students’ backend registration databases (students’ information system) and course catalogue system, enabling each individual course delivered to the students to be managed centrally by the lecturer and the administrator. The e-learning portal also allows the integration of various features such as instructor, student and administrative tools, instructional and administrative features and technical support to make the individual course design for the faculty members simpler and more effective. It allows them to incorporate various features and functionalities to make the design more comprehensive, meaningful, consistent and more organised when conveying information to students (Marshall, undated).

There are basically three types of LMS, namely the Home Grown LMS, the Proprietary LMS and the Open Source LMS. Among the Proprietary LMS versions are the Black Board, Web City, Lotus Learning Space, Convene, Embanet etc. with the Black Board and Web City Control occupying 85 percent of the LMS market in higher education (Berkely, undated). At the School of Distance Education (SDE), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), we decided to develop a customised in-house LMS called the Interactive Distance Education Application (IDEA). An incrementally developing in-house LMS (using open source software) has been favoured by the School as opposed to the commercially available one due to various reasons. Apart from the software costs, there is a wide range of LMS available and new products appear regularly with later versions of the existing products being substantially improved. On top of that, not all features of the commercial LMS are suitable or required in the delivery of course materials. Some commercial LMS have also been known to present difficulties when integration is attempted with the university students’ registration system, the online class schedule, the course catalogue system, the grade databases and contents servers.

The SDE embarked on the development of its own e-learning portal in 2003 and by 2004, the portal was fully utilised to deliver more than 230 courses in four programmes offering the Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), the Bachelor of Social Sciences (B.Soc. Sc.), the Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) and the Bachelor of Management (B.Mgt.) with a total enrolment of more than 5,500 students. The portal was designed based on the early study of Hanafi et al., (2004). In the design, the emphasis of the portal was its role as a supplementary support system to the existing printed modules, live video conferencing and the annual residential intensive course. As such, the e-learning portal developed by the SDE was intended to have the following (Kuan et al., 2004):

a. Access to supplementary learning materials to support the main learning materials in the modular printed form.
b. Access to assignment questions (and their answers) from course managers.
c. Online handouts which are additional to the discussion materials already used in the video conferencing sessions.
d. Synchronous or asynchronous communication with course managers and peers.
e. Regular online postings on matters such as upcoming events and other related course management issues and relevant information.
f. Access to examination questions of previous years.
g. The staff directory and information.
h. Links to other educational resources related to the course.

The overall main page and the course page of the portal developed are depicted in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 respectively. The pedagogical design, database design, web structure and screen design of the portal are described in detail by Kuan et al., (2004).

In the web structure design, four user access levels were developed, namely, for the students, lecturers, bulletin editor and administrator. In the student access level, four main functionalities were embedded in the portal, these being the Announcement, Learning Activities, Communication and the General Support System. These main functionalities were subdivided into the following eleven sub-functionalities:

Figure 1. The overall main page of the e-learning portal
Figure 2. The course page of the portal depicting the course (codes) registered by the students

In the development of the e-learning portal, these functionalities were assumed to be useful to the students in assisting their learning activities. For the e-learning portal to be an effective course delivery mechanism, an evaluation of the functionalities was necessary. Many evaluations of the LMS have been carried out such as those by Marshall (undated), Illinois (undated), Zulham et al., (2002). The studies looked at the inherent characteristics of the LMS such as its usability of the instructor, student and administrator interfaces (Wyles, 2004) and usability issues such as ease of importing/exporting contents, the access level, contents sharing capabilities and accessibility (Belyk et al., 2002). There were also evaluations undertaken to look at the stability of the system especially under heavy user loads as well as failover capabilities in hardware to support user increases. The system architectural design of the LMS was also studied to look at the source code composition, the application server and database used, the supported client operating system and browser compatibility.

In this study, the usefulness of the functionalities embedded in the e-learning portal used to deliver the distance education courses was evaluated. The usefulness was measured by the extent to which the functionalities were being accessed. The most frequently accessed functionality was defined to be the most useful and the least accessed was considered the least useful. In undertaking this study, the following questions were asked:

a. What was the extent of computer availability and Internet accessibility among students to enable them to use the e-learning portal?
b. What were the rates of the current usage and basic competency levels to enable the students to utilise the e-learning portal effectively?
c. What was the extent of usefulness of the functionalities embedded in the portal as perceived by the students?

The results of this study are imperative for the SDE as they provide an insight into the readiness of the students to utilise the online academic support system. Additionally, they also provide the information valuable for the web structure design relating to the functionalities of the e-learning portal. The most useful functionalities should be given due consideration for further improvement so that they satisfy student needs and requirements, facilitating their learning process.

METHODOLOGY
In order to determine the extent of the usefulness of the functionalities embedded in the e-learning portal, a specially designed questionnaire was developed that looked into the four main functionalities namely the Announcement, Learning Activities, Communication and the General Support System. The questionnaire consisted of three sections. Section A contained questions pertaining to the demographic details of the respondents. Section B contained questions related to the background usage of the computer, such as computer availability, Internet accessibility, frequency of usage and general competencies in using the main portal features. Section C contained questions related to the usefulness of the functionalities. Eleven sub-functionalities were listed and each of the functionalities was accompanied by a 5-point Likert scale, with 5 is most frequently used and 1 the least frequently used.

The questionnaires were distributed during the 2004/2005 annual residential course. A total of 186 questionnaires were finally used in the analysis. The demographic data revealed that the sample consisted of 57.7 percent females and 41.4 percent males with their ages ranging mostly from 31 to 45 years old. The majority of the sample were Malays (78.5 percent) followed by Chinese (11.3 percent) and others (5.4 percent).

The analysis of the usefulness of the functionalities involved the extraction of the total mean of each of the functionalities and ranking these means to provide the sequence of the relative importance of the functionalities embedded in the portal that the students utilised. The functionality with the highest mean would indicate the most frequently accessed and thus, the most useful, whereas the functionalities with the lowest mean would indicate the least frequently accessed and thus, the least useful.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The availability of home computers among students is depicted in Fig. 3 while the Internet access to these computers is shown in Fig. 4. It is evident that most students had computers at home but Internet access was marginally lower. The computer availability at the students’ workplace is shown in Fig. 5 while the extent of the Internet connectivity of these computers is depicted in Fig. 6. The students who did not have the Internet connection at home or at the workplace would find difficulties in accessing the e-learning portal at both places. Only half of the students had computers at their workplace and only about a third of these computers had Internet connectivity. It was felt that it would be pertinent to find out if these students had alternative ways of accessing the e-learning portal. Fig. 7 depicts the students’ usage of the cybercafé as an alternative source of access to the e-learning portal. The result shows that the cybercafé was being used at a very minimal rate as a source of access to the portal. This results support our earlier studies (Atan, 2003) that there were indications that some distance learners had been placed at a disadvantage where computer availability and Internet access were concerned.

Figure 3. The home computer availability among students. Available – 92.5% and not available – 7.5%

Figure 4. The Internet access to their home computers. Access – 67.7% and non- access – 31.2%

Figure 5. The availability of computers at the workplace. Available – 48.8% and not available – 48.9%

Figure 6. The Internet access of the computers at the workplace. Access– 62.9% and without access – 35.5%

Figure 7. The use of cybercafes to access the e-learning portal. Most frequent – 7%, seldom –42.5% and never – 49.5%

Figure 8. The frequency of usage of the e-learning portal. Daily – 6.5%, more than 3 times a week – 19.4%, > than once a week– 25.3%, < than once a week – 44.1%

In terms of basic computer competency, three features related to the usage of the e-learning portal were studied – competency in using the e-mail, web surfing and file downloading. The results are depicted in Table 1. As indicated in the table, more than two-thirds of the respondents were at the level of being very competent and competent in utilising the basic features of the e-learning portal. These results are very encouraging as they indicate a satisfactory level in the students’ readiness in terms of the basic skills required when using the online academic support system. Appropriate steps must also be taken to ensure that students who are at the level of being less competent and the least competent are not left behind in their attempts to acquire the benefits presented by the e-learning portal. The introduction of basic computer competency courses with emphasis on the full utilisation of the e-learning portal to all first year students would be a step in the right direction. In this way, students would be able to acquire the basic computer competency skills pertaining to the usage of the e-learning portal.

Table 1. Basic competency in using the features of the e-learning portal

Table 2. The level of usage and usefulness of the functionalities of the e-learning portal

5 – most frequent; 1 – least frequent

The results of the analysis in terms of the usefulness of the functionalities are depicted in Table 2. As shown in the table, the functionalities of Course Information (mean=3.33), Information on Study Programmes (mean=3.31), Assignment Questions (mean=3.30), Past Examination Papers (mean=3.06) recorded the highest means. All these sub-functionalities related to learning activities. It is evident that the frequently accessed functionalities in the e-learning portal were the functionalities related to learning activities. Students who frequently accessed these functionalities developed a right perception of their usefulness as the functionalities assisted them to understand and comprehend course contents (Navarro & Shoemaker, 2000). It is therefore imperative that the future design and improvement of the e-learning portal should take into consideration learning activity tools. The lecturers must also use instructional strategies within the learning activity functionalities of the e-learning portal to create versatile, highly motivating and engaging supplementary learning materials. With suitably designed learning activities, students would be challenged to the limits of their abilities and would utilise the various pedagogical strategies that would facilitate their learning, hence maximising learning effectiveness (Chen, 1997).

CONCLUSION
The benefit of the e-learning portal as an academic support system is far reaching. The communicative features of the portal empower geographically dispersed groups of students to collaborate with each other for learning facilitation. The portal also provides students with supplemented links to other Internet resources that enable the downloading of multimedia based learning resources that integrate various media attributes, such as animation and audio and video systems that have the potential of enhancing the students’ understanding of course contents. However, a continuous assessment of the features imbedded in the portal is imperative especially those pertaining to the degree of their usefulness. This study revealed that the functionalities related to learning activities were the most frequently accessed by the students, indicating the degree of their importance. The future design of e-learning portals must accordingly take into account the improvement of these functionalities. With continuous evaluation and improvement, the portal would attain the highest quality in the provision of support for teaching and learning in distance education

REFERENCES
Atan, H., Rahman, Z..A.. & Idrus, R.M. (2003). “Computer mediated communication: the level of readiness among distance education learners at USM”, DE Network, vol. 3, no.1, pp. 4-7.

Belyk, D., Schubert, J. & Baggaley, J. (2002). “Technical Evaluations Report 5. Classification of DE Delivery Systems”, IRRODL, vol 2. no. 2 http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/viewPDFInterstitial/42/537.

Berkeley. (undated). Web-based learning management system. [online] http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~fmb/articles/web_based_1ms.html

Chen, L..L. (1997). “Distance delivery system in terms of pedagogical consideration: a reevaluation” Educational Technology, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 34-37.

Hanafi Atan, Zuraidah A. Rahman & Rozhan M. Idrus. (2004). “Characteristics of the web-based learning environment in distance education: students’ perception of their learning needs”, Educational Media International, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 201-211.

Illinois (undated). “Enterprise learning management System – evaluation factors, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign” [online].
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Zulham Hamdan, Norzila Manap, Noorhayu Kassim, Hanafi Atan & RozhanM Idrus. (2002). “Learning management system benchmarking: An assessment of the open source learning management system” . In Hanafi Atan & Rozhan M Idrus (eds.). The Integration of Instructional design and technology on Teaching and Learning, pp. 351-360. Kuala Lunmpur: Malaysian Educational Technology Association.

Figures

Figure 1. The overall main page of the e-learning portal



Figure 2. The course page of the portal depicting the course (codes) registered by the students



Figure 3. The home computer availability among students. Available – 92.5% and not available – 7.5%



Figure 4. The Internet access to their home computers. Access – 67.7% and non- access – 31.2%



Figure 5. The availability of computers at the workplace. Available – 48.8% and not available – 48.9%



Figure 6. The Internet access of the computers at the workplace. Access– 62.9% and without access – 35.5%



Figure 7. The use of cybercafes to access the e-learning portal. Most frequent – 7%, seldom –42.5% and never – 49.5%



Figure 8. The frequency of usage of the e-learning portal. Daily – 6.5%, more than 3 times a week – 19.4%, > than once a week– 25.3%, < than once a week – 44.1%

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