Practical Research of Online Teaching Platform on Reform of Computer Network with Flipped Classroom

In order to meet the policy requirements of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China for undergraduate education, increase the effective learning effect, enhance the degree of academic challenge of college students and reasonably increase the difficulty of curriculum, expand the depth of curriculum, flipped classroom is used in most colleges and universities to carry on the reform of curriculum teaching. flipped classroom is a new teaching method originated in the United States. The flipped class starts with students watching the video of the curriculum at home, which was prepared by the teacher or others [1]. When they come to school, the students and the teacher finish their homework together, discuss about the questions and problems. Because the roles of students and teachers are intertwined, and learning at home, while completing homework in school, the way is different from traditional teaching, so it is called "Flipped Classroom".

Flipped classroom has improved the disadvantages of traditional teaching, students have changed from passive learner to active inquirer. This teaching model not only makes the traditional silent college classroom become active, but also greatly increases the students' learning interest. In the practical reforming withing flipping classroom, if the flipping classroom was combined with SPOC, which means Small Private On-line Course, will make full use of online teaching platform, manage and control the learning process of students effectively, and exert the advantage of flipping classroom to the maximum extent [2].

Computer network is an interdisciplinary course, which integrates computer technology and communication technology. It is also the core course in specialty of computer science. The teaching content of computer network involves a wide range of abstract knowledge and variety of principle. From the point of view of teaching requirements, the course helps students to have the ability to understand the theoretical knowledge and to combine the theoretical knowledge with practice and the technical ability to apply. The course is usually set up as a combination of theoretical and experimental courses. In the course of theoretical teaching, teachers adopt the traditional teaching methods in classroom and give exercises after class. Students learn theoretical knowledge after learning in classroom, lack of innovative thinking, and lack of the ability to learn independently. In addition, the cultivation of students' practical ability depends entirely on the practice course. The students can understand the knowledge of the theory course in the experiment class, but the experiment doesn’t embody the application practice content of the computer network in the theory course. Therefore, from 2016 to 2018, our school has carried out the reform of the teaching mode of computer network in two classes for two semesters, in the experimental exploration, and the design of the scheme, besides the trial of the platform. The practical research has carried on the reform in many aspects and gained more experience. It has made full use of many network online platforms, and has gained experience of using each platform's function, the superiority and the weakness. The experience is helpful for the future teaching reform and for the exchange with others.

At present, the popular online Teaching Platform is basically in the form of web site on PC or applications on handy. Each online teaching platform has its own features and functions. Here, we introduce two online teaching platforms, Moocunion Site and Chaoxing Xuexi Tong.

A. Moocunion Site

Moocunion Site is a web site which supply different online services for online teaching and learning. The complete address of this web site is: www.moocunion.com.

The online services provided on the website can be divided into different section. In the flipped classroom section, if a user was registered as teacher, he has the following permissions functions.

1. Class Management. Class management. In this module, users can create classes as instructors to teach. In order to avoid the random establishment of the class by others, an application must be made before the class is established and approved by the administrator to establish the class. When the audit passes, the teacher can write class data to facilitate students to find the class and join the class. Because the flipping classroom teaching is different from the large-scale teaching, it is necessary to carry out a lot of teaching activities in the class scope, so the teachers' administrative authority to the class is very important. In the class management module provided by Moocunion, class announcements can also be issued to facilitate the release of class notices. You can also look at class students and learn about each student's learning status. At the same time, teachers can also join other classes as students to learn other courses.
2. Video Management. In this module, the instructor can upload his own recorded teaching video to the web server, the format of the video can be flv, mp4 and wmv. When you publish a video, you need to fill in a brief introduction to the video, put the video into a classification directory, and select the class to which the video was posted. After the video release is completed, all videos are stored in categories and can be edited or modified again in the video directory. You can also see how many times the video has been viewed and what the video has been commented on. Users can also collect other people's videos into their own video records, and their own watched videos are automatically recorded in the history.
3. My Interaction. Among the teaching procedure, teachers and students interact with each other with questions and answers. This module provides users with note information function, diary function, question function and answer function.
4. My Course. This module of my course mainly shows the related courses, instead of related classes. Show the videos which the user is currently studying, and recommend videos according to my hobbies with big data statistic.

B. Chaoxing Xuexi Tong

This software includes website page client and mobile phone app client. Any changes made by one client are automatically synchronized with another client. This feature greatly facilitates the use of teachers and students, all users can do any operation at any time, anywhere. For flipped classroom, which includes complex teaching activities, it provides a great convenience. Compared to moocunion, Chaoxing offers nearly 10, 000 undergraduate courses in various disciplines, besides interest courses and public curriculum. All the functions are supplied on online teaching platform based on the school, which needs to be purchased at the school's expense [4].

After purchasing the using of online teaching platform for the school, all the teachers and students do not need to register the accounts, the user information will be transferred from the school to the online teaching platform. When teachers carry out flipped classroom for a course, they can set up a course under their user function after logging in. Once the course is offered, it will automatically produce a curriculum code, through which students can join the class with this code and set up the study of flipping classes [5]. There are lots of functions of Chaoxing online platform. The different modules will be introduced as following.

5. Home page. On the home page of the course, the teacher should create a catalog of the contents of the course at first, and then select the sections where the video needs to be uploaded according to the directory. When uploading the video, one can insert a question at any time point in the video, to ensure the students watches the video carefully. Only after answering the question correctly, the student can continue to watch the video. The watching progress of the video is automatically recorded in the student's learning process, resulting in scores.
6. Activities. This feature includes several small functions. Teachers can set the check-in function so that students can click on the mobile phone to attend the course at a fixed time. In addition, students can also be asked to answer in class, or to vote questionnaire after class.
7. Statistics. Since self-learning effect is important of flipped classroom during the semester, it is necessary to record and evaluate the students' self-learning process. The statistical function can count the teachers' knowledge points in the curriculum contents catalog, record the number of times and duration when students watch the video, count the scores of after-school assignments and tests, count the students who fail to complete their tasks, and remind the teachers to pay attention to them.
8. Information. All after-class exercises and assignments are stored in this module as materials for this course. In addition, teachers can upload extra-curricular materials and learning content here to help students learn autonomously.
9. Management. Because of the heavy workload of the online teaching platform, teachers can set up one or two students as assistant tutor to help complete the teaching process. Such as homework correction, data uploading and so on.
10. Operations. Teachers can assign assignments to online platform in a variety of question types, and each will set scores and answers in advance. The system can automatically score according to the objective questions, subjective questions need teachers to check the answers and then give the scores.
11. Examinations. The test questions can be generated automatically according to the difficulty of homework and the chapter, which greatly reduces the workload of the teacher designing the test paper.
12. Discussion. Teachers and students can ask any question here and get answer in time.
13. Notification. Once the teacher sends out the homework or has the temporary message, can issue the notice to remind the student to finish in time. Because the software can be installed on the mobile phone client, so the effect of reminders will be much better than the web-side software.

All of the above functions can be completed on the mobile phone side or on the web site. For users who are accustomed to carrying mobile phones, it’s a good tool for saving time and improving efficiency.

The online teaching platform of flipped classroom not only brings the greatest advantage to the new teaching mode, but also brings about the effect of teaching reform to a certain extent. To choose a fully functional, affordable online teaching platform is important decision for each teacher and school. This paper compares the two online teaching platforms used in the reform of flipping classroom teaching, expounds their main functions, and compares their advantages and disadvantages. For the other courses to select online platform, the content is a helpful reference for those who want to make appropriate choices.