The Approach and Research of Localization for Student Response System

Introduction

Current Student Response System (SRS) (Lu, Pein, Hansen, Nielsen, & Stav, 2010) is initially derived from the EduMecca project to handle anonymously on-the-fly questions for local and distance lectures between teachers and students. The previous system provides a single language based voting services to allow students to submit anonymous responses. Two friendly and interactive interfaces, a control interface (SRS-CI) (Pein, Scanlon, Lu, Thorseth, Stav, & Moldovan, 2010) on the teacher side and a response interface (SRS-RI) on the student side, are designed in SRS. A teacher needs to enter a “username” and “password” in order to log into the control system, whilst a student only needs to enter a session code generated by the voting service from the teacher side to join into an open session and make voting. The SRS-CI (Pein, Scanlon, Lu, Thorseth, Stav, & Moldovan, 2010) is developed using Flex Builder 3 as a desktop application to run in Adobe Air runtime. This application can be easily used with multiple operating systems and communicate with web service. The application is made transparent and can be automatically updated (Pein, Scanlon, Lu, Thorseth, Stav, & Moldovan, 2010). On the other hand, the simple, intuitive and responsive web-based SRS-RI is implemented using JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology, which has Java embedded in HTML and enables the web page to show dynamic content.

After being developed and tested in classroom for over two years, SRS has been deemed necessary to be utilized in European countries (European Commission, 2011). To integrate multilingual operations into SRS design, it is imperative to carry out internationalization and localization of the system.