Extending the Functionality of LMS to Support Computer Science Education Using Plug-In Tools

Abstract

E-Learning is the environment that supports the education field and provides the knowledge of a specific area in one place. Computer Science Education (CSE) is one area that uses the aspects of e-Learning to educate the learners and to distribute the knowledge to them. Several Learning Management Systems (LMSs) support many software tools to manage the theoretical materials of the CSE. However, the practical software tools that are needed by the Computer Science courses are ignored or simply not considered in most of the LMSs. To overcome the limitations of the LMSs towards the practical aspects of the CSE, this paper shows how to prepare the tools and make them available for use anytime through the LMS. For this to work, the authors of this paper take a step forward in discussing how to extend the LMSs functionality in general and Moodle as a special case. This extension involves adding the needed software tool as a component to the architectural structure of Moodle. Moreover, this paper introduces some literature that supports and implements these kinds of extensions.