The Design and Development of Courseware for MCA Students through LMS

The primary objective of this paper is to unveil the specific problems noticed in the quality of the MCA students emerging out of Anna University affiliated colleges and to suggest a research work which may lead to a collective feasible solution for these problems. MCA students enter the professional PG course in computer applications after their UG degree from different arts and science disciplines with just ancillary level mathematics background. So, the course faces heterogeneous entry behaviour. Also due to the advent of more engineering and arts colleges offering MCA, students exhibit a heterogeneous behaviour in their motivation levels, communication skills, logical and reasoning aptitude and computer software skills. But the requirement is to enable them with good academic performance with scope of employability. Employability skills include communication skills, logical aptitude, programming logic, computer-software-based technical skills and so on. Learning management system (LMS) is a software through which students can access the course, enroll, attend and write formative quiz-type exams to assignments and can participate in forums to share their ideas through online. While participating in a forum or quiz or writing to a blog, students with less confidence are able to overcome their inhibition and communicate freely. This is the first step of growth in communication skills which subsequently help them to gain better technical skills. The current research proposes to design, develop and deliver a part of a computer science courseware for 'Object oriented programming with Java' through the Open source LMS Moodle. The design of courseware includes the lecture session of the course, lecture notes, corresponding formative evaluation questions like quiz and other evaluation methods like forum and assignments. Installing an LMS and making the students attend the classes through that media is a matter of hesitation in many of the Indian Universities. Though Open source LMSs like Moodle and Sakai are available and proved good, initial efforts have to be put up not only by the faculty members for content and formative evaluation tool development but also by the administration. Administration has to support the project financially, in gaining the necessary infrastructure and for the internet connectivity throughout the learning period. But, weighing the benefits and limitations of LMS, we understand that for the better future of the students in the national and international level, in the long run LMS-based education will serve the best. A research project to justify the advantages and disadvantages quantifying the various aspects is planned. This paper also suggests that if at least one of the pre-final semester papers is offered through an open-source LMS, the students, institution and the nation will be benefitted.