e-Taalim

With the rapid development of Internet technologies, the conventional computer-assisted learning is more and more moving toward a web-based learning. How to assist learners in creating self-regulated learning abilities efficiently is an important issue.

IDLE is a free, open source interactive learning environment developed for academic use. It supports arbitrary interaction within distributed learning communities and facilitates both students and teachers through courses and make it more practical.

IDLE’s goal is to make the learning environment as interactive as possible so that both students and teachers can benefit when using it, and bring to the web an approximation of the interactivity we experience in everyday life as well as providing better classroom environment in exercise session and group work. Teachers can use IDLE, for instance, to put exercises, guidelines for the exercises, and the required materials for learning, as well as hold exercise sessions in classroom environment and grade students.  Students can, for example, signup to the courses and their exercise groups, perform the exercises and get guidance on them, as well as upload their answers in the system and see the the results when they are published.

IDLE provides a range of services that are necessary for a course, including:

• Signing up for the course and exercise sessions
• Lecture, exercise, and other material, including learning videos
• Interactive exercises, both online and offline
• Forming static or dynamic student groups
• Booking times for review sessions
• Grading the exercises for individual students or student groups
• Integrated Wiki, discussion groups, mailing facilities, etc.

IDLE provides a special feature called classroom environment. This is a set of functionality that is used for forming a special kind of enhanced learning.

During an exercise session the teacher can open the classroom environment and students can join into it. Several students can log into the same IDLE session and form a dynamic group. In dynamic group everything will be saved for the whole group and can be viewed by the whole group later on. In these dynamic groups the students can not only learn from the teacher but from each other.

After the creation of the groups, the list of groups and their members are visible to the teacher. So the teacher will be able to see which group is performing what task. It gives the teacher flexibility to evaluate the students during the session, and help them if needed. Student’s answers can be shown on the video projector at any time, where it can be discussed and corrected if necessary.

Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed learning assisted mechanisms aids learners by speeding up their learning abilities and help their learning performance!

IDLE was developed by the the department of software systems at Tampere University of Technology (TUT) in Finland. IDLE program is free software: it can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the Affero GNU Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Operating Systems:  Windows   Unix   Linux   Mac OS X

Implementation:  PHP 5  CSS   JavaScript   

Translations:  English   Finnish     French

Download IDLE from sourceforge (find documentation, bug/feature tracking, forums, …)

 http://www.cs.tut.fi/~idle/download.html