Development of e-learning system using handwriting on screen

Abstract

This paper describes the development and enhancement of an e-learning system to replace the conventional blackboard and student note-taking approach. The concept is based on hand writable student terminals that connect to the teacher's terminal. An earlier version used PDA but this advanced approach uses tablet or note PCS as student terminals. The wider screen improves usability and facilitates writing and drawing. The teacher can evaluate work via thumbnails of each student screen. The teacher can write comments to individual students and also project examples of good answers to a wide screen for the benefit of the whole class. The functions provided to students enable simultaneous view of teaching materials and annotation capability, Internet search access and immediacy of teacher response. Evaluations of this upgraded approach by ten students were very positive. We are planning to extend student's terminal into Android Tablet PC. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.