The design of asynchronous learning environment /

Asynchronous Learning Environment (ALE) has the capability of providing learning to people anywhere and at any time for both to secure degree and to engage in continuing education throughout their lifetimes. The advance of communications and information technology will make students choose to purchase and enroll in open market, widely available networked courses regardless of institutional affiliation.Research results have found that success factors for asynchronous learning include whether students felt part of the online learning group, immediate feedback from instructors, automatic self-test, and indicating student's performance and progress in the course. These findings present basic requirement for the design of ALE. This paper explores all aspects of Asynchronous Learning Environment, including the architecture of ALE and complete database design. The modules of ALE include multimedia presentation, identity verification, intelligent agent, automatic test marking, computer conference, chat & whiteboard, and learning scheduling assistance. The purpose of this research is to make ALE a better way of education than traditional education. A database is designed to fully support these ALE functions.Guidelines of designing ALE are provided with implementation examples of intelligent agents that providing automatic reminders and learning progress report. Conclusion and further works are discussed at the end of the paper.The design described in this paper is intended for use by engineering courses. But it can be used by courses of other disciplines without much modification