Web-Based Collaborative Learning: A proposed Learning Platform for the School of ICT, Auchi Polytechnic

摘要

Technological advancements in the World Wide Web continue to gain widespread adoption, with various kinds of applications finding their use in education, including those for 'digital collaboration'. The term has become widely known for its extension of our traditional means of distributed learning and workflow. In present-day Nigeria, collaboration between students and educators in most tertiary institutions still involves the most basic use of instant messaging tools provided via online chat forums, google groups, WhatsApp, for knowledge sharing over the internet. However, these tools come with their limitations. Take 'Yahoo' and 'google' groups for example; yahoo groups are meant solely for students possessing yahoo mail accounts, and the same applies for google groups. Overall, the user-access convention on these platforms makes it difficult for students to enjoy any cross-platform privileges in the absence of email ownership on the particular service domain. Owing to this, our research project sought to bridge this identified gap, with a pilot project in the School of ICT, Federal Polytechnic, Auchi. We proposed the development and implementation of this unified platform to meet the salient and underlying collaborative need within our learning community. The system (PolyCollab) is a cross-platform web application, hosted on an online server and designed using MVC model architecture. The framework was developed using PHP, CSS3, HTML5, and MySQL for the database. The system was subjected to evaluation by potential users within the institution, and on the whole met with predefined user-specific requirements.