A team at NTU’s Computer and Information Networking Center designed and developed its own LMS in 1995 and called it the CEIBA system ( https://ceiba.ntu.edu.tw/). The main CEIBA interface is in Chinese. An English interface is available and English content construction is possible for faculty who wishes to use it, especially for those who offer international courses (see Figure 1). Initially, it was created as a system for faculty to place course supplements online. In 2001, an educational technology support team was formed to redesign the CEIBA system as an instructional management system. The total number of courses using CEIBA has grown from 100 in 1999 to 2,300 in 2005, and then reached 4, 100 in 2007. This number does not include graduate seminars, physical education, or service courses that ₁₉₀ may also use CEIBA. The ₁₆₁ total number of faculty members who placed ¹¹⁶ courses online also has grown from 60 in 1999 to

1,246 in 2007.

CEIBA (version 4) was redesigned to focus on the teaching aspects of using an LMS. User support was increased to help faculty members overcome the technological barriers of using an LMS.

Instructive design. CEIBA teaches users about instructional design.

The system was based on instructional design traditions in educational technology from scholars such as Gagné, Briggs, and Wager [ 6]. While providing tools for online instruction, the LMS informs faculty members about instructional design steps such as setting goals, making the structure explicit, encouraging interaction, and including evaluation. In addition, CEIBA enhances faculty knowledge about the courses and students. The LMS assists professors with the following functions:

weekly outline page. They type in the first date, and the rest of the 17 weeks of weekly class sessions appear automatically. A professor can enter the weekly topics and go into the weekly course pages that are linked automatically to the topics.

• Class roster: CEIBA connects to the registrar’s office and retrieves information from the student records. The faculty automatically receives updated student records data throughout the term. Professors can print out the class list, and can send email to individuals, small groups, or the entire class.

• Student homework: CEIBA allows students to sub-
mit homework online to professors. The LMS has
an option to allow sharing documents with other
students. With this feature, students can show
homework with a pro-
fessor’s comments to
other students.

200 180

Numbers of Professors

180

160

140 130

120

100

100 91 80 60 ₄₉ 40 20 0

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Inclusive design. CEIBA ⁹⁵ 90 accommodates both novices and experts. The LMS has features that allow experts to quickly bypass step-by-step pages designed for novices. CEIBA was designed to prevent experts from get- ^Colleges ting frustrated by features for novices, while Figure 2. NTU professors shielding novices from the complexity of technical ^{using CEIBA between 2000 and} _{2007 by college.} systems of advanced functions. The LMS offers the following:

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• Course syllabus: To build a CEIBA course Web site, a faculty member goes into a course introduction page, where there are course titles, course objectives, course evaluation, and grade assignment. These choices force the faculty member to lay out the information about the course before the course starts.

• Course schedule: After completing the course introduction page, faculty members advance to a

• Course creation: Professors are given three ways to create a course. Faculty members can link to their own course Web sites, import course outlines or the entire course from previous CEIBA courses, and create new courses.

• Content editing: An online Web page editor is available. Although the functions of the editor are simple, the editor provides tools for novices to manipulate text, typefaces, bullets, hyperlinks, and graphics.

• Student grouping: CEIBA allows a class to be divided into groups. It also allows two classes to be combined to use the same interface, mainly for professors who have two or more sessions of the same class.

• Interactive activities: CEIBA has a course resource sharing board, an announcement board, a discussion board, and a voting board, to which the teacher can post announcements and questions.