Design and Application of Central Examination System for Life-Long Learning with Web-Based Distance Education

Abstract

In our age, information and communication technologies are intensely made use of to make a connection between student and teacher, and to establish an educational environment appropriate to the requirements of this era and society, in distance education. The fact that student, teacher and teaching material are distant from each other, as a factor that reveals the difference between distance education and traditional education, forces to use different methods in order for the evaluation activities to be conducted much more effectually. However, the reliability of on-line examinations is discussed in cases where important documents like certificates, diplomas, etc. are to be given by universities and other institutions that provide life-long distance learning. Among the reasons of this are the difficulty of detecting whether the person sitting for an exam is one who should sit for that exam, and whether he/she uses the instruments apart from the ones allowed for him/her use in the exam. For this reason, the universities providing distance learning are obliged to use central examination system in order to evaluate the success of students even though they had given the lessons to their students by means of web-based distance education method. Distance learning departments of many universities in our country have established more recently. Most of those departments haven’t got a substructure based on central examination system. A sample application of central examination system (DECES) which Distance Learning Departments of the Universities can use, has been developed and introduced with this study. Adequate and inadequate aspects of it have been specified thereby analyzing the systems existing firstly. Afterwards, an appropriate platform was searched for encoding of DECES and open-source programing PHP language and MySQL data-base have been chosen. The tables in the system were formed using relational data-base model and encoding was made using the properties of object oriented programming.