Second, a look at the numbers in Table 5 shows that some functions appearing in nearly 10 platforms are also rather common, which shows the importance of these functions. They include calendar and payment in personal management as well as reminders in social management. The author believes that the personal calendar tool is of great importance in personal learning management, payment details help the students track their personal financial information, and reminders pertinent to assignments, test appointments and online Q & A are especially important ways to offer students individualized learning information. Construction of these functions should be strengthened.

Table 6  Commonly Used Functions of Distance learning and management platforms 

4. Analysis of common learning activities

The second level coding in Table 5 presents an initial classification of students’ online learning activities based on specific functions. An analysis of the second level coding helps us better understand commonly used online learning activities. When analyzing the statistics, if a given platform had any functions corresponding to a certain second level coding, the platform was regarded as supporting the online learning activities described in that second level coding. This paper considers online learning activities appearing in 15 or more (half of the total) platforms as commonly used online learning activities, and those appearing in over 20 or more (two-thirds of the total) platforms as core online learning activities. Hence, on the basis of Table 5, the students’ commonly used online learning activities are listed in Table 7, with core online learning activities in bold face.

First, from an overall perspective, the core online learning activities are personal information, peer communication, community exchange, help and consultation, course content learning, tutorial Q & A and practice test.

Second, a contrast of the services reveals that the numbers of commonly used learning activities in the three categories of services are 2, 4 and 4, respectively. On one hand, this shows that platform support for social management and course management activities is relatively comprehensive, while support for personal management is rather weak. On the other hand, since the online learning activities in personal management are closely related to the actual management models of each distance education institution, the small number of platforms also reflects the great variation in management models among distance education institutions. For example, some institutions do not require students to select courses, make test appointments or conduct school registration online.

Third, as seen from the specific functions in Table 5, the selection of functions for commonly used learning activities in social management is incomplete. This is especially true for the two core learning activities of peer communication and community exchange, which both have 5 specific corresponding functions. However, only the functions of internal mailbox appear in 20 or more platforms. The only functions appearing in 10 or more platforms are schoolmates and teachers and short message for peer communication and public forum for community exchange. It is easy to see that although there is a great variety of functions relating to social management activities overall, individual platforms have inadequate support for social management.

Finally, as for learning management, the commonly used learning activities offer comprehensive coverage of content and their specific functions are well-developed. It is worth noting that 12 platforms offer an online test function. A qualitative analysis shows that the online test function is mostly used as a practice drill before an on-site examination. Distance education institutions still favor the on-site examination format.

Table 7  Commonly Used Online Learning Activities of the Students

IV. Functional framework for the back-office management system

Most platform back-office management systems use the directory tree structure for organization; their functional structure is uniform. Therefore, this paper does not include an in-depth discussion of their functional structure. Instead, it focuses on the specific functions of the back-office management system.

LSMS asserts the following in relation to back-office management functions: First, the students are the final service recipients of distance education. Therefore, management services should be defined based on students' online learning activities, and back-office management functions should be defined based on those services in order to provide students with the best service. Second, back-office management functions vary widely due to the different management models of distance education institutions. To this end, this paper focuses on the commonly used functions of learning systems and summarizes their corresponding back-office management functions and management services.

By centering on the learning system’s three categories of services (personal management, social management and learning management) and their common functions and combining the research results of the author’s master’s dissertation^[13] on the demands for domestic distance education platforms, the functions and services of distance education systems and teachers are summarized, and the back-office management services are sorted into the three categories of student management, campus management and teaching management. The results are shown in Table 8 below. It should be noted that although some distance learners register offline through off-campus learning centers or local RTVUs, administrative staff need to process enrollment transactions online, including enrollment information registration, examination site arrangement, pre-examination tutorial and admission statistics.

Table 8  List of Back-office Management Functions Based on Students’ Online Learning Activities