Chapter 1

The Problem and Its Background

Introduction

The world of information has changed dramatically. These widespread changes may be considered a precursor to a second industrial revolution from which an information society may emerge. In the field of education, academic institutions are continuously challenged by social events unfolding in its midst. Developments in the workplace, changes in students’ demographics, and economic trends force educational institutions to change. Despite the improvement of educational institutions, employers and students have needs that the current education system failed to meet. In order to survive these upheavals, educators must improve their teaching and learning using technology.

Quality education calls for educator who can give quality teaching. Hence, quality teaching requires quality techniques. Techniques are the practices and refinement of presentations which an educator employs to make instructions more effective when using a specific method of teaching. Educators should select appropriate learning materials to associate learning into a larger whole. Cruz (2004) said that the nature of the computer subject calls for an intensive and comprehensive way of presenting the lessons through advanced technology.

The future ramifications of adopting technology into instructional settings can be significant and far-reaching and can produce a substantial and a direct result of technological innovations. Educational technology support plays a critical role in helping faculty add technology to their teaching (F. Moser, 2007)

Many educators, parents, and students believe that modern technology should be an integral part of education. This rationale is based on two major points. First is the widely accepted belief that technology plays an essential role in the educational system and that school and classrooms cannot deliver high-quality education without using technology-based methods. It was an established fact that applications of modern technology have contributed so much in improving learning process.

University students and instructors alike with little or no computer experience are often overwhelmed by the use of technology in the classroom. On the other end of the spectrum are those who are very proficient and comfortable in using computer-based technology. The specific technology installed in any university setting constantly changes in both sophistication and function. Classrooms are being wired so that faculty can use the latest software, incorporate electronic presentations into their teaching, present video, and/or connect to the Internet.

Higher education today requires that all students have a certain basic familiarity with the tools used throughout their educational programs. The continually advancing capabilities and the increasing variety of available functions and features result in a continuing need to test for the computer-skills necessary to ensure student success. Universities must accept the challenge of ensuring a technologically-adept student population.
Rapid technological advancements in contemporary workplaces require higher order thinking from employees. In preparing students for these workplaces, instructors and trainers in the field of technical education and training have an important role to play. They must provide opportunities for students to engage in higher order learning. In doing so, appropriate learning theories and pedagogical principles should be applied. With the increasing availability and accessibility of microcomputers, instruction that combines sound learning principles with the functionality of computers forms a potentially effective teaching method called computer-aided instruction (CAI).
The field known as Computer-Aided Instruction or CAI as it commonly called has guided considerable interest and support since the advent of microcomputers. More and more people, including those in supervisory positions are beginning to see the advantages both cost and time, in having training available in the workplace.

Meycauayan College, one of the prestigious institutions in Bulacan, aims to respond to the needs of the country by providing a well-balanced education emphasizing academic excellence enriched with moral values, formation of the human person by installing a sense of personal dignity and love of God and country leading to professional competence and responsible citizenship, through it’s Computer Education course takes pride to the challenges facing institution with the fast-rising global industrial trend brought by new technology. It envisions itself as a college of transparent and responsible members who commit themselves in the integral formation of self-reliant individuals who have strong faith in God equipped with knowledge, skills and virtues for excellent personal development, united to contribute towards the building of a peaceful, just and humane society.

As mentor, equipped with knowledge in computer technology, committed to the vision of the college, hereby presented a study on “Development of Web-based Programmed-Instruction Software in PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor Programming”. The nature of instructional delivery on the web has certainly become more open than the closed programmed instruction software available in the past. However, programmed-instruction has proven itself useful for some forms of learning via the web. It is worth considering how programmed-instruction was implemented for computer instruction in the past and how that might be combined with other theories to enhance instruction delivered by the Web.

PHP is an open source server-side and HTML-embedded scripting language for Web servers, which provide dynamic Web pages just like ASP, ColdFusion, Mod_Perl or JSP. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. This confuses many people because the first word of the acronym is the acronym. This type of acronym is called a recursive acronym. HP/FI 2.0 is an early and no longer supported version of PHP. PHP 3 is the successor to PHP/FI 2.0 and is a lot nicer. PHP 5 is the current generation of PHP, which uses the Zend engine 2 which, among other things, offers many additional OOP features. C and Perl developers will find it particularly intuitive to learn Dynamic Web pages are pages which interact with the user, so that each user visiting the page sees customized information - which may vary each time and which may be based on a form they've just filled in, or on information extracted from a database or some other external source. Typical applications include e-commerce, online newspapers, visitors' books, ticketing systems, project management, and other groupware projects. The traditional way to produce this type of dynamic page is via CGI scripts, but these are separate programs which must be executed as a new process for each page hit, so they scale badly and rapidly become memory and processor hogs as server load increases.

PHP solves this problem by becoming a part of the Web server, essentially extending the functionality of the server itself, so that the server can do the processing without having to spawn extra processes. It's not alone in doing this, but unlike most other scripting languages for Web page development PHP also offers excellent connectivity to most of the databases in use today. Perhaps the greatest advantage of PHP, when compared to other scripting languages such as ASP or ColdFusion, is that it is open source and cross-platform. PHP's natural home is on Linux servers running Apache server software, but it runs equally well on any other Unix or Windows platform, and can be used with other Web servers.

PHP started life as a Perl program written by Rasmus Lerdorf to track visitors to his online résumé. It was then rewritten in C and was extended to include support for database access. From these simple beginnings the open source community has expanded and developed PHP into a powerful server-side scripting language.

Imelda DC. Reyes
ymellereyes@yahoo.com