1. Resource Manager for Distance Education Systems Goran Kimovski Vladimir Trajkovik Danco Davcev Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Skopje, Macedonia

2. THE WHOLE PICTURE

3. Introduction zThe general idea of the Resource Management system is to enable sharing of many different resources between as many users as possible. zThe idea of the resource is not limited to some laboratory equipment. It can be some software application or some interface to data stored in a remote database for example.

4. Principles zobject-oriented approach zthe object communication is standardized zstationary agents as entities that work on different tasks in the system zall communication protocols within Resource Manager are defined using XML

5. Logical Model: The architecture of the RM

6. Resource Manager Model: Class diagram

7. Resource Manager Model: Collaboration diagram

8. XML defined protocol

9. Implementation The main components of the RM service RM is implemented in Windows environment. All agents are developed in Java, with exception of Resource Simulation Agents, which are based on DCOM technology.

10. Implementation: Resource Manager in action resource: Robot Car resource: XML Validator http://odl-skopje.etf.ukim.edu.mk/vlab/

11. Experimental Results zWe involved end users (students) in functionality testing and used feedback from them to add all requested functionality zWe involved 38 users from Macedonia and Italy in the usability and education efficiency analysis. zIn general, users are satisfied with the RM usability

12. Conclusion zWe extended the concept of distance education with adding a new service, that we call Resource Manager zBy combining object-oriented design and definitions of common interfaces for the different types of agents for different types of resources, we designed extensible system, in which resources are added in an easy way.