A Material-Framework-Object Model for Learning Material Management
Following problems have been found in traditional learning material management model based on courseware: common redundancy, the overlapped and desultory construction of the learning materials, and hardly adaptive to the diversity of the learning objectives and teaching methodologies. In the paper, a material-framework-objective model was proposed to improve the efficiency and quality of learning material management in the distance education by separating and recombining the basic materials, courseware, knowledge-points and learning goals. The model can also achieve the unification of the reuse, mobility and pertinence of the learning materials. A prototyping based on this model has been developed and taken into practice in Dongbei University of Financial and Economics.
Computer supported learning. A large-scale, web-based learning and assessment system to support flexible education
With the increase in cost and resources constraints experienced by many tertiary institutions globally, the pressure to find alternative methods to deliver teaching and assessment increases. Whilst mindful of the learning experience of the individual, the need to manage the numbers, resources and assessment provide an administrative overhead and headache to every professor who has ever taught. With this predicament in mind the computer supported learning system (CSL) is a web-based teaching and learning resource and administration system, developed by the Business Education On-Line Unit of the Auckland Business School, at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). We call it Cecil. The paper describes the Cecil structure and discusses the potential benefits that a university wide resource management system may have in terms of the educational flexibility and resource sharing.
Early Cretaceous Feathers from Victoria
Unusually well preserved fossil feathers from Lower Cretaceous (VaIanginian-Aptian) claystones at Koonwarra, Victoria, are the oldest (c. 110-125 million years) bird remains yet found in the southern hemisphere, They are among the oldest bird remains known in the world, being antedated only by the toothed Archaeopteryx from the late Jurassic of Bavaria, and being more or less the same age as Gallornis from the Lower Cretaceous of France. The Victorian fossil feathers are evidence for essentially worldwide distribution of birds soon after the beginning of the Cretaceous, if not before. The feathers could conceivably have come from toothed birds.