September 2005 — Features
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Dissecting a Network-Based Education System
The methods used to design the Alabama Learning Exchange can be replicated to create your own efficient, cost-effective, network-based education systems.
The Alabama Learning Exchange (ALEX; www.alex.state.al.us) is a network-based education system designed and implemented to help improve education in Alabama. It d'es this by providing a single location for the state’s K-12 educators to find information that will help improve their classroom effectiveness.
The ALEX system includes courses of study, content standards, lesson plans,Web resources, listservs, a bulletin board, and other educational resources. ALEX was patterned after the Georgia Learning Connections education Web portal (www.glc.k12.ga.us) and input received at a SouthEast Initiatives Regional Technology in Education Consortium (SEIR*TEC) Academy. At the time, there was a significant need for a Web site that could provide teachers with a way to access teaching guidelines, search them, and find lesson plans that could assist in the teaching of those guidelines. ALEX provides this central location for educators to find teaching resources and collaborate with statewide counterparts. Before the deployment of ALEX, most teachers also had to share one book of content standards for each course of study. But because of this new education portal, accessing the content standards is now more convenient for teachers.
System Configuration
From a development standpoint, ALEX is divided into seven sections (see Figure 1): Teacher-Created Lesson Plans, Personal Workspace, Courses of Study Content Standards, Web Resources, Teacher-to-Teacher, Teacher Zone, and MarcoPolo Lesson Plans. Additional sections, including search, help, suggestion box, and site map sections, have been added to make the site easy to use.
The system, as illustrated in Figure 2, consists of two Linux servers: one is the Web server and the other is the database server. Thee Web server has Red Hat Linux 7.2 installed with kernel version 2.4.7-10, runs Apache 1.3.22, and has one 600MHz processor with about 20GB of disk space and 256MB of RAM. The scripting languages used in the development were PHP and PERL, which both reside on the Web server. The database server has Red Hat Linux 7.3 installed with kernel version 2.4.18-19.7.xsmp, runs MySQL 3.23.56, and has two 2.2GHz processors with about 758GB of disk space and 1GB of RAM.
Courses of Study. Alabama has content standards (guidelines) for each course of study and subject. The tblStandards database table was created to hold content standards for all subjects. It was designed to ensure data could be displayed in a manner similar to the way it was in the course-of-study content-standard books that are distributed by the Alabama Department of Education to K-12 teachers each year.
