The Paper That Held My Whole PhD Together

This is the journal paper that tied together years of my doctoral research into one story.

The Core Problem

In 2013, when I measured it, Indonesia's average internet speed was 2.4 Mbps, ranked 93rd in the world. Meanwhile, lecturers were being told to use Learning Management Systems like Moodle. There is a contradiction there. Moodle needs a constant, decent internet connection to author content. Many Indonesian lecturers did not have that.

The usual advice, "just install Moodle locally," ignores reality. Installing Moodle means setting up a web server, a database, editing config files. Most lecturers are not sysadmins. So they gave up on the LMS entirely.

Two Problems, Not One

There was a second problem I had not seen discussed anywhere. Indonesian lecturers often teach at multiple universities. And those universities use different LMS platforms. One uses Moodle, another uses Chamilo. So a lecturer has to learn and maintain content across incompatible systems. The tool that was supposed to help became extra work.

The Solution: LBST

I built the Lecturer Based Supportive Tool (LBST). Run one Python script and it becomes a local web server with its own database. Lecturers author content offline, no internet needed. When they eventually get a connection, the tool syncs to the remote LMS through standard web services.

To bridge the different-LMS problem, I built Bridge.xml, a converter between Moodle XML and IMS QTI (the assessment standard Chamilo uses). Now an assessment created in one system could move to the other.

The whole thing was small enough to run on a mini device, a little board I could carry between classrooms. The interface was responsive, so students could access materials on their phones.

Why This Paper Matters to Me

My earlier papers were pieces: the REST synchronization, the Moodle plugins. This journal paper, published in the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), was where all the pieces came together into one coherent argument. It was the backbone of my doctoral work at Kumamoto University.

The evaluation showed lecturers found LBST easier than Moodle for creating and modifying courses, and more than half the students found it easy to access materials on their own devices. Not a revolution. But a real tool that solved a real problem for real people in a place that most educational software ignores.

Read the Full Paper

Read the full paper: Lecturer Based Supportive Tool Development and Approaches for Learning Material Sharing under Bandwidth Limitation →

Published in the Journal of Information Processing (IPSJ), Japan, March 2016.