Theprimary target is offering automatic courses that do not require theintervention of people other than the student, except for the creation of new courses.
Oncethe student is enrolled in one course, he will study it by himself with the aidof the Viewer.
Coursescan be offered on the Internet (through an online connection) or as a “package”delivered directly to the student’s hard drive.
Courses.
One course is composed of a set of Learning Units, which the students have toaccomplish in a variable way. All courses are initiated in Unit number 1; however,the next Unit to be studied is determined by the application according to thestudent results in the previous Unit.
Onthe other hand, one Learning Unit is composed of a set of sub-units that wewill call “Elements”. Some of these elements are:
Annotated games. The classical annotated games that make up the basis of Chess education.
Exercises. Similar to an annotated game, but a number of moves are deliberately omitted and must be found by the student as part of the exercise.
Hypertexts. Rich formatted texts with embedded images, videos, and any other element that can be incorporated into an HTML web page (including applets, Flash contents, etc.) Any other item that can be visible through Internet Explorer might be a suitable element.
Forms.A particular case of hypertext that contains a question allowing the student toprovide an answer. In response, the application will evaluate that answer awardingthe appropriate value.
Thenumber of elements that make up a unit and the number of units in a singlecourse is decided by the creator of the course in his/her criteria.
Thestudents can have access only to the units they are currently working on, aswell as those they have already completed. In each course there can only be oneunit under study. We will call it the active unit.
Electronicsmagazines
Thisapplication allows to edit electronic magazines. The magazine is the equivalentto a course where each Learning Unit is the magazine number and the differentarticles are the unit elements. If you want to publish a new magazine you haveto create the appropriate unit and set it as the active unit for all thesubscribed students. The
GesPla utility is used for that purpose, activating thenew unit and deactivating the previous one.
Whena customer subscribes to the magazine, the active unit for him will be thefirst issue available from the time he got subscribed. As new issues are published,they will become the active unit. However, he will maintain access to theprevious numbers through the button “previous units” (covering all previousnumbers included in his subscription period).
Theoperation flow followed by this application to manage e-learning or e-magazinesis described next.
Press the Connect button (
). A menu will show the different contents available.Initially, the only option will be Magazine:
When you click on this option, the applicationwill connect to the Internet Server to request the last magazine number thathas been published. This number will be shown in a new window.
Thereader will select it from the list, pressing the OK button.
Thepop up window will be closed and the contents of that issue will be shown on a listin the lower part of the screen.
The reader can have access to each element by clickingover the corresponding line of the list.
The contents manager.
Thesequence by which one student goes over the different Units, in each course willdepend on the results he will be gradually obtaining from the previous units.
Themechanism that allows determining which unit has to be studied next for a givenstudent is what we will call the content’s manager. It is based on twoconcepts:
Student’s qualifications.
Progressconditions.
The exercises and web forms allow designating thestudent’s qualifications in the following subjects
ELO
Strategy
Tactic
Opening
Middle game
Endings
Eachstudent has a global qualification for each of these subjects. For each unit thisqualification will fluctuate depending on his answers to the exercises and webforms.
Theprogress conditions are equations that produce a True or False result when theyare evaluated. These equations, like any other formula, are composed byoperators and operands. The operators are the traditional mathematic operators(+) plus, (*) multiplication, and (/) division, plus the logical comparison operators(>, <, =), (&) AND y (|) OR. The operands can be numericalconstants or the student’s grades in the different subjects, either globally orrelative to one specific unit.
Toreferencethe global student’s grades in one equation the followingvariable names are used:
elo
st
tact
aper
med
fin
While making reference to the student’s gradesobtained on each specific course unit, these are the variable names to be used:
velo
vest
vtact
vaper
vmed
vfin
The“Syntax” button present in the content management through the GesPla tool,allows to check that the equation is formally correct. To make this checking,let’s assume the following values for each variable:
Variable
value
Variable
value
elo
0
velo
6
est
1
vest
7
tact
2
vtact
8
aper
3
vaper
9
med
4
vmed
10
fin
5
vfin
11
Toregroup different parts of one formula you must use parenthesis, for example,for progress conditions:
Eachprogress condition has an associated unit number; therefore, if the evaluationof the condition is true, the following unit to be studied will be thecorresponding to this number. If the resulting evaluation is false, the contentmanagement will evaluate the following progress condition and so on until it canfind a true evaluation.
Asyou can see, the order in which the progress conditions are specified isrelevant, because if several of the progress conditions would result in a truevalue, the one that will make effect will be the first one in the sequence.
To make sure that the content management willalways be capable of finding a follow-up unit (except for the one for the lastcourse unit), the last condition, which we will call “closing condition”, mustbe true by itself, for example:
0 = 0
Anotherimportant aspect is that the content management will omit the evaluation ofconditions which, if becoming true, will take the student to a unit that he hasalready studied. That situation has to be taken into account when defining the closingcondition. If the unit number associated to that particular closing conditioncorresponds to a unit that the student might have already studied in a previousunit, the closing condition will no longer be valid and would be omitted by thecontent management.
The elements.
Wedescribe here the element contents that are the basic parts of the course.
Oneindividual element may contain various information packages. One given elementwill never contain all the available packages, because some of those packagesare used for specific types of elements. Each element, at the very least,should contain one package.
Theseinformation packages are the following:
Content in PGN format.
Answers to exercises in PGN format.
HTML content
Solutions to HTML forms or exercises.
Evaluationsto the student’s answers.
Oneelement of type 1, that’s to say, of annotated games, will contain only thefirst package, content in PGN format. This package contains one game (only one)in PGN format.
Oneelement of type 2, that we have called exercises, requires a primary content inPGN format and, optionally, the answers in PGN or HTML format. This optionalcontent will be shown to the student once he has submitted his answers. It isnot essential because the possibility exists of introducing comments in primarycontent in PGN format. Those comments will be hidden until the student finishesthe exercise. One exercise does not need the evaluation of the answers package becausethose evaluations are embedded directly into the PGN content, following thesame syntax as the Viewer for Peon the Rey magazine. If you include thatpackage in one exercise it will simply be ignored.
Thetype 3 elements or hypertext can only contain the HTML package.
Thetype 4 elements, the forms, may contain up to four or five type of packages,normally three. As a minimum, they will always include the HTML content packageand you can also include:
A primary PGN package.
A package to show once the student presses the “send” button from the form. It can be of PGN or HTML type. It is up to you.
It’svery likely that it will include an answer evaluation package.
Theanswer evaluation package will be present in almost all forms because it is theone that will allow the application to verify the student’s answers against theright values.
Eventhough a form having only the send button makes apparently no sense, it servesto verify that the student has provided an answer to all active elements ofthat unit. In that case, the content manager activates to switch to the nextunit automatically.
Finally,as these types of elements also accept a PGN content package, the student couldreplay the game in the board. However, the “panel” where the game is visualizedwill not be available. Therefore, it does not make any sense that he PGNcontent includes comments or variations, because the student won’t be able tosee them. However, should they exists, it will not raise an error.
Answers evaluationpackage
Eachcomponent of an HTML form (text entries, checkboxes, buttons, etc) has a name(for example square) with an associated value (for example e5) depending on thestudent’s answer. When the send button is pressed, it generates a sequence withthe name-value pairs (for example, square=e5) of all components contained inthe web form. The application interceptsthe request to process the form values and compares the student’s answers withthose present at the evaluation package. The answers evaluation package syntaxis related to those name-value pairs as follows:
Itis a sequence separated by periods and comas (;) with the following structure:
name=value that will besearched in the student’s answer. If itexists, the system will award him the specified match points included in thatevaluation concept (0 = ELO, 1= strategy, 2 = tactic, 3 = opening, 4 = meddlegame, 5 = final). If it does not exist the system will award him the failure points (it will usually be a negative number). Oneexample could be:
Thecomputer processing unit is the URL that should be specified in the “action”parameter that all HTML forms must include. All form elements of thisapplication must use the value http://datosva
Inthe same way, for the sending of data, any HTML form can use one of the two knownmethods, GET y POST. All form elements of this application must use the GET method.
Accordingto all of the above, the HTML label which defines the form element will alwaysbe the following:
The HTML content always has to be a complete page, that’sto say a page which starts with the <html> tag andfinishes with </html>. It also requires the pair of tags <body></body>.You do not have to worry about these things if the content is generated with anHTML web page editor such as Microsoft FrontPage. However, you do need to takeinto account the reference to external objects, specifically images. Any URL (link)contained in the web page has to be an absolute reference link to an objectcontained in a web server, for example, to include an image, you should writesomething like http://www.interajedrez.com/imagenes/curso1/imagen.gif
Thereason for this is that these objects are not part of the e-learning database,therefore, they are not sent to the Viewer as part of the didactic unitelements, and the applications has to obtain them directly from the web server.
Inthe case of a “package” distributed to be used without connection, the imagesand videos can be referenced through an absolute URL as we saw before, but wewould then need to be connected to be able to watch them. The alternativeoption is referencing the images and videos locally, by their name without anypath information, for example: imagen.gif. In this case, the applicationsearches the images in a folder named images and the videos in another folder named videos.Both folders are located directly in the folder where the mdf file from the package was installed. Therefore, when thepackage is distributed, the images and videos must be included so they can becopied to the images and video folders in the same directory where the costumer decides to install thepackage. This can be done easily if, for example, the package is compressedwith an application such as Winzip.
This is also valid for images and videos thatcan be referenced from a PGN content as part of the TAG’s
Or as comments in the body of the game{IMAGE:illescasa.gif}.
Pageswith APPLETs.
TheHTML web pages, corresponding to online course elements containing an APPLET,should include the CODEBASE with the absolute URL. For example:
Coursesdistributed as “packages” should not include the CODEBASE. Furthermore, the JARfile (or class files) should be put in the same folder as the database, wherethe mdf file is.
Electronic magazine & online learning. 
). A menu will show the different contents available.Initially, the only option will be Magazine:
