e-learning initiative based on a Web-data-based university information management system

The Technical University of Graz has started an e-learning initiative to support multimedia methods in engineering education. Our first target was to provide all of our courses' documents on the web. Moreover, the use of interactive tools as well as monitoring features and tests will be used. A major factor is internal transparency of our courses' contents, which will result in a better adaptation and demarcation of all courses. Furthermore an improved level of interactions between instructors and students, especially during courses, is aimed for. For this and other purposes our university decided to create an overall information management system which is used as the e-learning portal. So we have designed a data-model from scratch that incorporates all resources of our university. As a user-interface we have implemented a web-database application, that includes all features of a state-of-the-art intranet-portal.