Design and implementation of a distance educational system

Many universities throughout the world explore the possibilities of on-line delivery of educational programs. These developments have a great potential on the transition from the traditional face-to-face education process to the distance education programs which become one of the rapidly growing computing approaches. In this paper, we developed a distance educational system namely, WebCAT, that provides many capabilities and tools for both student and instructor. It allows the instructor to build a full online course including material, syllabus, schedule, references, links, exams, automatic grading and ways to follow up the performance of students throughout statistical charts. Finally a comparison with existing broadly accepted systems, such as WebCT, shows that our system is comparable with it.