The E-Learning Project Review (2) System Design
At this stage, we need to design the structure and architecture of our system using the diagrams we learned from the course "System Design". The most basic series of the diagrams are use case diagram and sequence diagram. Drawing these diagram is painful! Also, we need to draw the sitemap to specify our jobs to do. We used Gantt chart to track our process, ensure we didn’t fall behind.
To draw these annoying but important charts, we used an online tool called "CACOO".
The Use Case Diagram of our system (Drew on 20150402)
At the same time, I designed the login page and main page of the system.
The Login page of our system (Drew on 20150402)
The Main page of our system (Drew on 20150402)
The Main page with Siderbar (Drew on 20150402)
During this period, we did not do much coding work because of the busy communication between NLIS and us. NLIS carefully discussed about the design to us and purposed the demand of this system. After the discussion, we divided our project to 5 big tasks:
| basic system UI and functions | This task was going to write the UI and search function. |
| class page | This page is the main function of this system, which will show the course content. The basic requriement of the class page is to simply show some slides on it. |
| examination page | This page lists the practice question sets we wrote to let the user review what they learn in the courses. |
| historical record page | This page record the performance of the quizzes the user has take. Since we introduce bookmark feature to the class page, the bookmarks were be shown here |
| manager system | This system enables the manager to upload, modify, and delete the teaching materials (including the slides and practice question sets) in the E-Learning system. The manager could also post some announcements on the main page using the manager system. |
We though the functionality of the class page should be more interactive, not just a static slides printed on the page. Due to the time limit, however, we could not afford so many tasks. Therefore, we had a consensus with NLIS, which was about the improvement of the class page would not include in the requirements. Both the department and NLIS viewed this project as a 3-year-project, which the junior colleagues would continued our work. The improvement of the class page became the junior colleagues’s job.
When the time was about May 2015, the system design was almost done. The next stage was to do some coding work!