ON-LINE DISTANCE LEARNING PLATFORM

Sergio Ramírez

Computer Architecture Department, University of Malaga, Spain

Hugo Rosales

National University of Piura-Perú, Peru

Oswaldo Trelles

Computer Architecture Department, University of Malaga, Spain

Keywords: e-Learning, video-conference.

Abstract: In this work we report a software platform for synchronous distance learning, which makes the presence of

teachers in the student’s house possible, deploying the same class, in the same time, with the same mates,

through the internet. Thus the working scenery is a normal student room, in which some students are present

and some others are virtual students with interactive presence that allows to participate, be interrogated by

the professor, and maintaining a fluid communication with partners. Several important technical aspects has

been solved using public domain components: web-browsers, blackboards, on-line messaging –chats,

forums-, and real time sound delivery. All these components have been integrated in a user friendly

environment with record of use, and interface customisation for different age-levels. The participation of

learners, psychologist, computer-science technicians and teachers has allowed a very simple but powerful

way to integrate our children in the educational circuit.

1 INTRODUCTION

Current trends in the technology information domain

go towards the multimedia and networking

technologies. Immersed in this information

revolution era, education is one area with the

greatest impact, with richer and more expressive

models to represent the contents (images, sounds,

video), with the elimination of distances between the

teachers and the students and with the possibility to

receive updated knowledge in fast and inexpensive

ways. On the other hand, there are several social

groups whose members have limitations to regularly

attend the school (i.e. children with haemophilia,

diabetes, etc.), with severe influence in the learning

rhythm and in social integration with friends.

A software platform for synchronous distance

learning, to make the presence of a teacher possible

in the student’s house –or wherever they are- giving

the same lesson, in the same hour, with the same

friend , through the internet would be of special help

in the social integration of these students. The child

workspace can be drawn as a normal classroom, in

which some students are present and some others are

remote connected with interactive presence and

active participation with both teachers and students.

There have been many previous efforts in the

design and development of methodologies in this

application domain (i.e. GroupLog (Bath University,

2003), Moodle (Dougiamas, 2003) or Academic

Talk (JISC UK, 1998) for asynchronous distance

learning as virtual campus). Unfortunately, these

tools are expensive and/or not focused specifically

on educational environments (i.e. on video

conference: Netmeting (Steves, 2001), MSN

Messenger (Microsoft, 2006), Mbone (G. Fortino,

2002) and Marratech (Marratech AB, 2006). There

are also public-domain tools provided by academic

centres and other institutions, mainly related to

specific research issues such as a particular

technique or algorithm implementation.

500

Ramírez S., Rosales H. and Trelles O. (2007).

ON-LINE DISTANCE LEARNING PLATFORM.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and e-Government /

e-Learning, pages 500-505

DOI: 10.5220/0001274005000505

 SciTePress

In this project we present a software tool that

covers the following combined features: (a)

centralized control of connections to reproduce

teacher functionality; (b) efficient and interactive

user friendly interface; (c) historical record of

connexions and data transmission (d) free

availability.

2 SYSTEM & METHODS

2.1 Major Guidelines

One of the key aspects in the design of our AVI

platform (Aulas Virtuales Interactivas / Interactive

Virtual Classroom) has been to ensure a centralized

control of activities as the best way to reproduce

teacher control in the classroom. The following

basic principles have guided the design of the AVI

platform:

 Component-based (e.g. modular design) as

integration paradigm to facilitate the

incorporation of new high quality multimedia

modules.

 Uniform but customisable interfacing for tools

including help system, training information, etc.

 Platform scalability is provided by means of

intelligent resource management to allow

increment on the number of user making use of

AVI at the same time.

 Robustness of the platform is ensured by server

replication at different sites.

 Enabling standard storage, secure access and

exploitation of proprietary data allow expanding

the scope of user applicability.

 Efficient use of computational resources is

achieved by intelligent computational load

distribution among the different modules of the

platform (server, client, teacher side…).

The language used for the modelling of the

system was UML. Next pictures represent some use

cases diagrams for the server, teacher and student,

the three main actors in this system.

During the development of the system we have

considered the following points of interest:

 Client/Server multithreads architecture based

on Java and TCP/IP.

 Mechanism to handle sessions and users

authentication.

 Protocol for send text data between users

 A module for send multimedia data (Video &

Audio) between the teacher and his/her

students, and from them to him/her.

 A tool to interchange of files.

 A tool for show web pages and presentations.

With this idea we implement an application that

allows participating in the school work for those

students who cannot attend in the classroom, by

making use of the facilities that Internet offer to us.

To allow this functionality the application fulfils

the following requirements:

 Establish a fluid video and audio

communication in real time, between the main

actors of the educational process, the professor

and each one of the students.

 Provide support for the traditional educational

activities and to the new ones, such as

electronic blackboards, video-conference, file

transfer, chat and browser of Web pages.

 Provide remote access to those students that are

unable to attend in the classroom, without

disturbing the “local” students.

 Implement software procedures to reproduce

teacher-student interaction (i.e. ask for

authorization to participate. In a particular

issue.

Figure 1: Use cases diagrams for the server module (on

top) and for the teacher module of the application (at the

bottom).

ON-LINE DISTANCE LEARNING PLATFORM

501

 Offer a simple interface to allow fast access to

most of functions in order to be easier to use,

and offer the functionality to customise the

interfaces in agreement with the ages of the

users.

 Allow the students to present/display their

homework during the period in which they can

participate in the class.

 Minimise the effects of the distance between

the students and the teacher, which is

fundamental for the acceptance of the method

by students and professors.

2.2 Design

The traditional video-conference tools are designed

to communicate every client with the rest of the

group, which makes it difficult for the teacher to

control the class and it wastes system resources, by

sending data between students that should not be

sent.

To avoid this problem the system has not been

designed with a pure client-server architecture,

because some clients (teachers) can work like

servers. This architecture leaves the central server

some minimal coordination tasks, while the clients

work in a distributed way.

To minimize more the data sent, the clients are

grouped by classes, so they only need to interchange

information between them, relieving the main server

of these tasks (Figure 2) and thereby improve the

efficient.

The main server is delegated to do some

functions of general coordination; it is in charge of

authenticate the users and give them general

information like the list of classes where they can

access and their contacts information (students in the

case of teachers and only the teacher for the

students)

For each class there is a sub-server, role played

by the teacher, which is in charge of handling and

coordinating the messages sent by the students in the

class. In this way, every student can see the teacher

and hear his/her explanations. The students send a

video stream to the teacher, when the class begin so

he/she can see what the student is doing, but they

can not send audio and participate actively in the

class until the teacher allows it, although the

students can ask for permission to speak, similar to

if they put the hand up in a real class.

No other data is sent from the students to the

teacher and never between students. In fact the ip

address of the students is unknown for all the clients

except for the teacher.

With this architecture’s schema each class is

independent of the others, decreasing the problem of

interferences between them, and the amount of data

sent by the clients.

The application uses three communications

protocols, two for the video and the audio

transmission, and other more for the transmission of

text messages and synchronization commands.

For the multimedia transfers we chose the

standard audio and video protocols provided by the

Java Media Framework (JMF) library (sun, 2006).

These protocols work over UDP so they provide real

time transmission but don’t guarantee the reception

of data.

For the coordination tasks, we created a text

commands based protocol. It has commands to start

and finish the class; handle the permission of the

students, get user info, etc. So, we need that these

messages arrive to the target, for that we developed

it over TCP. Other feature that this protocol offers, is

the possibility of sending text messages like in a

chat, this is the only global communication between

all the participants of a class, but always under the

supervision of the corresponding teacher, of course,

the teacher also can communicate personally with

any student using this method in a private way.

The modular design of the application, also

allows the inclusion of new features, as plug-ins,

which can extend and improve the functionality of

the program. For example, we have a tool to send

files between users of the same class or a whiteboard

where as much the professor as the students can

write and draw (always under the supervision of the

teacher) and also a practical slide show where the

professor can make presentations. Theses two

features can aid the teacher in the class when the

quality of the video sent by him/her has not got

enough quality.

Figure 2: Schema of the system architecture.

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3 RESULTS

A testing suite of the system here described is being

used by the Haemophilia Association of Malaga-

Spain (AMH) to help in the education of children

that eventually cannot attend to the school.

3.1 Installation Procedure

In this implementation (Rosales, 2006), the main

server application runs in the AMH-server and

clients can be downloaded from their web page

(www.hemofilia-malaga.org). The new clients can

obtain a password to access to the server by

requesting for it to the AMH (Figure 3). Once the

AMH verifies the request, they include the new

institution in the system and send them the user and

password for their own centre’s administrator.

With this password the administrator can access

to the server (www.hemofilia-malaga.org/avi) and

administrate the centre by him/her self, defining

classes, teachers, students, timetables, etc. A web-

based interface has been deployed to allow handling

the internal database and facilitating the

administration of the different centres, users and

classes (Figures 4 and 5).

3.2 Use Example

The application starts by showing the authentication

interface (see Figure 6), which includes the selection

of the specific server to connect and logging on it.

At present, the AMH has installed this server in

testing phase, but once the systems become

approved, it could be installed in each institution.

Just, this type of decision (a centralized server

against several loosely coupled servers) is close

related with robustness and trustworthiness of the

entire application, giving alternative to the user to

belong to several educational centers or virtual

academies.

Once the user is logged in the system, the

interfaces for students and teachers become

different. In Figure 6 we shown a list of classes

related with the user, the ones that the student can

attend and the ones that the teacher can teach.

Choosing one of those, the list at the bottom of

the screen shows the contacts’ state for the selected

class. In the teacher side, the state of all the students

registered in the class will be showed but in the

student interface the list will only contain the state of

the corresponding teacher.

From this screen the user can now enter the

class. A teacher can enter and start the class when

he/she decides so, but a student must wait until

his/her teacher begins the class.

When the class begins, the interface showed to

the user also varies depending if is a student or a

Figure 3: Registry formulary to request an user for a new

educational centre.

Figure 4: Formulary to add a new room in a centre.

Figure 5: Formulary to add a new user to a centre.

ON-LINE DISTANCE LEARNING PLATFORM

503

teacher. If the user is a teacher, he/she will find an

interface similar to the one showed in the Figure 7.

In this interface the teacher has got all the tools

needed to control his/her class.

When the teacher needs to open a document or

works with some of the features provided for a plug-

in, then a new screen is unfolded, providing an

independent and personal interface for every plug-in

where handle documents, interact with the user and

communicates with other clients.

The client interface for a student is similar to the

teacher but hiding those features that should not be

handled by the students, thereby simplifying the

application and making it more accessible by young

students (Figure 7)

The only action that can be done by the students

but no by the teacher is ask for the teacher’s

attention, so that he/she can give him/her the

possibility to make a question.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Internet and many other technological breakthroughs

have enabled a revolution on the way educational

contents can be deployed. In this work we report a

software platform for synchronous distance learning

created with the aim to help students to overcome

limitations that would otherwise keep them from

schools. We expect its use will have a positive

impact with their learning and social integration with

friends.

The system provides support to reproduce

traditional teacher-functionality such as enable or

denied access for participation; full control of

connexions (i.e. voice); distribution, task

coordination around the different students; etc.

Several important technical aspects has been

solved using public domain components: web-

browsers, blackboards, on-line messaging –chats,

forums-, and real time sound delivery. All these

components have been integrated in a user friendly

environment which includes a database with a log of

use.

Finally, the participation of learners,

psychologist, computer-science technicians and

teachers has allowed a very simple but powerful way

to integrate our children in the educational system.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been partially supported by grant

JDA40/04 from Junta de Andalucía-Spain.

REFERENCES

GroupLog: http://www.bath.ac.uk/e-learning/grouplog/

Dougiamas, M.,&Taylor, P, 2003. Moodle: Using

Learning Communities to Create an Open Source

Course Management System. World Conference on

Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and

Telecommunications 2003(1), 171-178. [Online].

Academic Talk: http://www.elearning.ac.uk/del/etools1/

Figure 6: In the left, Login-

Screen, providing option to

choose the server and input the login and pass

word. In

the right, Welcome-

Screen, where the user can take a

look of the classes and contacts.

Figure 7: Interfaces showed to the teacher (left) and the

student (right) when a class begin.

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Steves, M., Knutilla, A. and Wierba, E. A Manufacturing

Collaboratory Case Study - Companion Document,

NISTIR 6809, National Institution of standards and

Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, 2001.

MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com

G. Fortino & L. Nigro, Collaborative Learning on-emand

on the Internet MBone, to appear in Usability

Evaluation of Online Learning Programs, C. Ghaoui

Ed., Idea Publishing Group, USA, 2002

Marratech http://www.marratech.com/

Java Media Framework

http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jmf/

Hugo Rosales, Ismael del Águila, Maite Martínez

Paradinas and Oswaldo Trelles; “Synchronous

distance learning platform: School goes home in

Haemophilia”; 2006 World Federation of Haemophilia

- World Congress - Vancouver

APPENDIX

Additional information is available at:

http://chirimoyo.ac.uma.es/bitlab in the link

“products-> On-Line distance e-learning”.

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