Enhanced Learning and Educational Management through Online Collaborative Technologies

AbstrAct: Merging traditional ways of teaching with modern approaches as e-Learning, focused on online multimedia applications and technologies, developed in a collaborative manner, became a real necessity in order to enhance learning and educational management. In this paper we introduce our developed Education Management Tool (EDM), a visual, interactive and collaborative e-Learning solution, dedicated for optimizing the teaching, learning and testing processes in different Computer Science topics but also in any other scientific field. EDM allows geographically distributed students to contribute concurrently and collaboratively by working on the same application: designing, programming, debugging, testing and documenting. Besides that, EDM is free, easy to use, and helps to improve quality and performance in e-Learning, providing flexibility, extensibility and interactivity. The EDM Learning module allows defining lessons that consists of text-descriptions and media files such as images, flash movies or video clips. We illustrate how third-party lessons can be integrated into EDM by presenting our interactive flash applications about digital logic circuits and algorithms, two fundamental topics of Computer Science. One of the latest development achievements consists in a Management module, with proper administration of marks, averages, lessons and student's presence at courses and laboratories, which allows generating, printing and exporting reports. Another issue, extremely necessary during collab-orative writing and programming, is versioning, a mechanism which allows recovering any of the last ten versions of lessons or source codes.