Course web site as an integrated solution for e-learning, collaboration and publicly available knowledge base

Abstract

E-learning represents still dynamically evolving area of research. For one of the sources of its persistent topicality can be considered its close relationship to the development in the fields of web services, semantic web, online collaboration, and many others, that is constantly reflected by e-learning solutions. The view of e-learning solutions, in which they were perceived as an independent solutions designed specifically to support educational processes, is changing, too. It is becoming increasingly common to integrate them into the wider context of Web portals of institutions and to make their content publicly accessible. A similar intent led us to design and implement the Web portal of Knowledge discovery course, which is taught at the Department of Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics at the Technical University of Kosice. Our intention was to create a solution to support educational processes, which would also represent a publicly available knowledge base dedicated to the topic of knowledge discovery, as part of the virtual laboratory of Business information systems. In this paper we describe the implementation details of the proposed solution built on the results of four ongoing projects. The solution is described both in terms of technological platform, based on the integration of existing open source solutions and our own extensions as well as in terms of the specifics of its content, which is based on video tutorials, collaboratively created documents and case studies.