DEVELOPMENT OF AN E-LEARNING WEB PORTAL: The Foss Approach

With the vast development of various technologies, learning today is no longer confined to classrooms with lecture delivery as the only method of conveying knowledge, rather, an electronic means of learning has continued to evolve. Electronic learning (e-Learning), which facilitates education using communications networks, has made learning possible from anywhere at anytime using the Internet, wide area networks or local area networks. Notably, e-Learning applications which have now become central to the learning process may be developed using proprietary programming tools and the process of acquiring and using them to develop large software application is not only complex but require a huge sum of money. A viable alternative is to utilize the open source software platform that allows software engineers and institutions the right to reuse, study, distribute and localize to satisfy user’s requirements. This paper provides an overview of e-Learning and the open source domain as well as discusses how open source can be used to speedily realizes the development of an e-Learning application in a web environment using an adaptive process. Specifically, the authors described their preliminary experiment of implementing an open source e-Learning platform by adapting free PHP source code and MySQL database to suit an electronic class bulletin board