Development of an Interactive e-Learning Management System (e-LMS) for Tanzanian Secondary Schools

Abstract: e-learning, as defined to be the use of information and communications technology (ICT) for supporting the educational processes, has motivated Tanzania to apply ICT in its education system. Tanzania secondary schools in rural areas are geographically and socially isolated. Rural Tanzania secondary schools face a number of problems including ways in getting learning materials, as well as inadequacy in qualified teachers. The impact of these problems is poor performance in National Examinations. This poor performance however is highly noted in science and mathematics subjects. The problem in getting learning materials can be reduced by employing ICT in secondary school education system. This research develops an interactive e-learning management system (e-LMS) to be used by Tanzanian secondary schools. The research is aiming to support teaching and learning functions by allowing creation and storage of learning materials, making them available, easily accessed and sharable among students from different secondary schools in Tanzania in a more organized way. Tanzania has only one curriculum for all secondary schools registered under the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT). During development stage it will not be easy to involve all scattered Tanzanian secondary schools. The research is focusing to two selected pilot schools; Kibaha secondary school and Wali-ul-Asr girls’ seminary in Kibaha town, Pwani region. Features of the e-LMS will represent the standard form of any other secondary school registered by the MoEVT. The complete implementation of the e-LMS to these selected pilot schools will later be extended to all other secondary schools in Tanzania. The development uses Object-Oriented System Analysis and Design (OOSAD) approach along with the power of modeling as it has been emphasized by Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Unified Modeling Language (UML) is mainly used in both cases. To create an interoperable system, UML is integrated with extensible markup language (XML) during model transformation from e-LMS Platform Independent Model (PIM) to e-LMS Platform Specific Model (PSM). Development will make use of open source software. For context specific development, participatory action research methodology is adopted and the inputs are well presented in developing e-LMS. Customization of open source learning management system (LMS) platforms is employed to help generate a timely solution to e-LMS development. Finally, this thesis also considers the need for replication and mirroring of the database for the purpose of making learning materials highly available to end-users.