Strathclyde Personal Interactive Development and Educational Resource

Strathclyde Personal Interactive Development and Educational Resource
SPIDER (Strathclyde Personal Interactive Development and Educational Resource), is a virtual learning environment (VLE) used and developed at the University of Strathclyde, which gives access to course material, quizzes, discussion and chat rooms, exam results and news items. It can be accessed from any computer on the internet, though a specific Spider login is required. SPIDER has also been installed on-site at the International Medical University (IMU), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as part of the Twinned Pharmacy programme, which caters to around 500 users. It currently has 26,000 users, and celebrated its tenth birthday in December 2008. Over the course of 2008 it recieved 16.5 million visitors, and on average recieves 6,100 hit per week. There are over 1,100 classes contained within 19 clusters catering to over 150 degree programmes.
Development history
Strathclyde Personal Interactive Development & Educational Resource (SPIDER) started development in December 1998(1) as a web project to convert a single teaching module (class) into an interactive web environment. The success of this single module lead to the inclusion of more classes on the site. At this point, SPIDER was a "static" website, essentially all hand coded using plain HTML, the language used to describe web pages. This was a major flaw - as more and more material came to be added to the system, with only one developer, hand editing HTML became too time consuming.
Spider v1
Over several months SPIDER was modified to be more dynamic, following the emerging trend in website design - dynamic, database generated sites. The chosen technology was Linux based, using , PHP (scripting) and MySQL (database)and this meant that Spider was no longer using Microsoft products.
Spider v2
In March 2001, "SPIDER II" was released, an entirely dynamic, database backed system. All users logged in and could customise the environment to their own needs. Several user groups were created, determining users access rights on the system. The dynamic nature of the site also allowed for the implementation of many more features and tools, such as discussion boards, the quiz monitoring system (SQuID), news postings and more. The School of Pharmacy by this time had decided that SPIDER was to contain all material relating to the MPharm degree and many classes had compulsory sections entirely based on SPIDER. The other Bioscience & Biomedical degrees also benefited from the SPIDER technology as a sister site "BRUCe" was developed in tandem to cater for the staff and students related to these courses.
Spider v3
SPIDER III was launched around April 2002 with further improved tool sets, increased functionality, and a modularised development environment. SPIDER was now not only used to deliver support material for teaching, it became integral to a number or courses and vital for numerous departmental management tasks and database systems.
Spider v5
Spider V was the replacement for the third version of Spider. This built off of Spider IV, a version that was never officially launched, meaning the update to Spider after Spider III was known as Spider V.
Competing products
There are various other VLE systems that Spider competes with, most notably WebCT, however Spider gained traction within the University of Strathclyde as Students were found to prefer the Spider system over WebCT. WebCT is still used within University of Strathclyde, but it is not used as much as the in-house Spider system.

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