Last Updated on Thursday, 29 October 2009 18:23 Written by Administrator Wednesday, 29 April 2009 22:09

Gulf Alternatives initiated the development of a comprehensive educational software project aimed at enhancing and facilitating the educational process in all stages and types of education curriculums. We called it CALS which stands for Computer Assisted Learning Software.Computer-based systems for learning purposes are effective tools to reduce costs, improve quality and speed up the learning process. However, developing and integrating computer-based teaching, testing and assessing mechanisms for different types of educational subjects face many challenges. This project aims at building a complete software system that would enable instructors (Universities, high schools and/or Preparatory schools levels) to interact with students through a network and/or internet facilities. The software would deliver to the students, the subjects of the courses in a textual, graphical and any possible descriptive and/or multimedia means. The software would allow the students to test their understanding of the materials in the subject through quizzes and exams that are partially or completely monitored by the instructor. These quizzes and exams can be in different types among which: multiple choice, true/false and matching expressions.The main benefits of the system are:

• Maintain a profile for each student to hold his information, marks, grades and improvements.

• Provide practice exams and tests for student to check their level of understanding and familiarize them with the process.

• Make available different types of questions to pick from.

• Report on each student progress and improvement over time.

• Summarize class performance on same course.

• Reduce the volume of exam administration, as marking, grading and release of results will be automated especially for large enrollment courses.

• Help instructors identify the areas where their students need improvements and hence focus more on such areas.

• Provide flexibility in presenting the course materials. It may contain multimedia files like charts, videos and sounds to help clarifying questions to students. For example, in English listening a sound file would be necessary. However, a video file would be very useful to explain a subject such as Newton’s law in physics, whereas charts would be essential in economic courses.

• Support team to assist the users in deploying, using and resolving issues that may occur throughout the system's usage.

• Help desk facility.

Based on the previous experience of our team in building such software, we are planning to launch the new system soon.