A dynamic design model for online learning system development

Web-based learning systems have become more and more popular for universities to support their teaching and learning activities. Such a system normally requires progressive development under extreme time constraint in relation to the academic calendar and in the presence of some dissatisfaction known prior to the development. At any stage of the development, new service that was not included in the current phase of development but with urgent demand by users may be required to be added into the system. Developing such a system needs a dynamic design model, instead of any existing ‘static’ approaches. In this paper we propose a dynamic model based on prioritisation of characterisation of distributed systems for the design of Web-based systems. Application of this model in development of the Information Retrieval Learning System Online (IRLSO) at Jilin University in China shows that this model is useful in not only dynamically guiding the development of a Web-based system, but also prioritising tasks for the successive development.