Course management system (CMS) is expected to be a part of major system developments in educational intitutions as the information technology continues to emerge into all levels of education. Particularly, this trend has also been expanded to all post-secondary institutions. Indeed, the adoption of packaged commercial CMS (e.g. WebCT and Blackboard) is a common practice in most institutions, yet it is often lack of flexibility to satisfy the special needs in the institutions, especially in our community college. In addition to the issue of system design, a long-term financial commitment and the high cost of system maintenance are expected, which stands as the stumbling block in the college development To solve our challenges, we have adopted the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) [1] that offers an open and community source framework. In this paper, we propose a practical implementation method based on our design experience on our newly developed CMS using the Sakai project platform. Our approach is a cost effective solution with minimum resources usage such as the size of the development team, project time frame, and hardware requirements. In addition, technical backgrounds including the system architecture, software installation, tools development and system enhancements will be introduced and explained in details. We believe our experience in CMS development and research findings can make a significant contribution to the post-secondary institutions, especially in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2010 IEEE.

As computing technology continues to emerge into all levels of education, a course management system (CMS) is expected to be part of the primary system developments, which offers an enormous impact, particularly in today's post-secondary institutions. The adoption of packaged commercial CMS (e.g. WebCT and Blackboard) is a common practice in most educational institutions, yet it often lacks the flexibility to satisfy special needs of the institutions. This is especially true of our community college. In addition to the issue of system design, a long-term financial commitment and the high cost of system maintenance stand as stumbling blocks in the college's development of a CMS. To solve these challenges, we have adopted the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) [1], a CMS that offers an open and community source framework. In preparation to the system design and development, a needs assessment has been conducted to investigate the project feasibility and functional requirements, which serve as the keystone to our system implementation. In this paper, we articulate the motivations, feasibility study results, functional requirements, as well as the highlights of our current progress, future implementation and evaluation. We believe our experience in CMS development and research findings can make a significant contribution to post-secondary institutions, especially in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Teaching students how to code in K-12 classrooms is considered as one of the major keys to promoting engineering education in the future, which can potentially enhance the competency and computational skills of students to adhere better learning outcomes in higher education. The success of promoting coding education or integrating it into school curriculum depends on the perceptions of teachers and headmasters in schools, and how well they believe on coding education and prepare for the innovative teaching and learning. In this exploratory research study, it reports the results of a large-scale quantitative questionnaire surveying 42 primary and secondary schools (n = 42) in Hong Kong, where computer programming has not been regulated as a compulsory course in K-12 curriculum. The questionnaire aims to investigate the school belief on coding education and their practical challenges while integrating it into their regular school curriculum. Our results show that there is a trend in the local schools promoting coding education with positive perceptions on teaching and learning. However, teaching challenges are also mentioned in the survey waiting for solutions, such as lack of teachers training and unified curriculum. Therefore, the empirical experiences of these schools have set forth the future research direction in design and implementation of coding education in K-12 classrooms not only in Hong Kong but also in the globe. Copyright © 2015 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.