Development of a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) for Teaching Digital Circuits

The use of Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) is widely applied in the context of higher education, however, the development of ad-hoc solutions for specific courses is not so common. This paper attempts to show that the technology and infrastructure required for the implementation of a custom, online e-learning based software are minimal and freely available, and that, by allowing educators to develop their own tools, new ways of improving education could arise. A web application used in Logic Circuits Design courses delivered at Universidad Nacional del Sur for the Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering degrees, developed in this realm is presented. The software is called “Cipressus” and it provides a set of interactive tools that assists students in improving their problem solving skills, and by logging their interaction with the software, a large amount of data is generated which could then be used by professors and teaching assistants, not only to evaluate the performance of their students individually or as a group, but also to gain insights into the different learning styles and abilities of the course attendees.

I. Introduction

Social networks have become the main communication means among young people replacing traditional ones, as e-mail or direct messages. The introduction of smart phones in the first years of the new Century [1] together with the advent of websites and applications like Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn among others, produced a complete turn over in the way people interact, but specially among youth. New technologies in cell phone lines eases the on-line round the clock experience. Some social networks orient their content to multimedia or news broadcasts, others do so mostly through images and there are also those where predominate the real-time messaging. Even when young people are within talking distance, sometimes they prefer to exchange WhatsApp messages instead of a face-to-face conversation. This situation introduces a new framework to which education has to adapt in order to catch the attention of students. As a consequence, in order to keep a communication channel with students, teachers may have to adopt several communication means, including e-mail, one for multimedia content sharing and a third one for real-time messaging which can be used for urgent announcements.