Abstract

Course Manager is a web-based application for managing course information, instructor and marker information, student and group information, course marked entities, demo schedules and reservations, and grade information during the whole process of an undergraduate or graduate course. It also provides functionality for students to upload assignments, to conduct peer reviews, and to take online assessments; for markers to grade assignments and projects; and for instructors to schedule assignments and demos, and to prepare online assessments. The Course Manager system distinguishes five categories of users: administrator, instructor, marker, student and project group. Each user category is associated with a specific user access privilege and can only access the functionality within its access privilege. The Course Manager system is designed and implemented with a typical three-tier client-server architecture, which consists of the user interface tier on the client side, and the processing management tier and the database management tier on the server side. The user interface tier is made up of HTML pages on the client side, which control the presentation logic of the application. The processing management tier uses PHP as the scripting language. The PHP scripts are responsible for the application logic of the system. The database management tier uses MySQL as the DBMS, which controls the data logic of the system.