Development of a web-based virtual classroom system at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria

Abstract

The Internet is about the biggest technological advancement since the industrial revolution, and has fundamentally changed virtually every sphere of life, including educational paradigms and practice. This research work harnessed the joint and several advantages of the Web and its tools to design and write programs that run in the browser to implement a cost effective collaborative virtual classroom system. In the research,
Apache served as the web server; HTML was used to edit the web pages; Javascript for data validation; MySQL for creating the database tables; and PHP for writing CGI scripts. This paper focuses on the student module of the collaborative virtual classroom system, which was designed and implemented in the Computer Science department of the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), Nigeria. The system provides such
facilities as University news and calendar, results checking, course registration, online admission, and teaching support tools. The system also facilitates easy updates and maintenance.

African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science Vol. 18 (2) 2008: pp. 169-180