Distant electronic classroom utilizing low bandwidth internet

Abstract

The Internet is fast becoming the vehicle of choice for disseminating learning across distances. The main aim of this thesis work is to achieve a realization of Classroom Environment, by combining asynchronous and synchronous teaching-learning contents and activities, through the Internet. The thesis work is divided into two main parts. First part is development of Lecture Preparation Application for the teacher. It makes it easy to divide complete Lecture into Sections and allows rapid integration of Text, Pictures and Sound in required format. It provides facilities of importing Text and Figures through Scanner and allows formatting of Lecture content. Provision for recording and compressing Sound narration for each Screen is available. The teacher can easily preview and navigate through complete Lecture during its development. Second part is the development of Server Side Software that provides basic logging facilities to the teachers and the students of different Subjects. The teacher can easily upload all Lecture content without any need of manually selecting the files. Activation of Lecture offers different Modes of Classroom, thus it is possible to deliver prepared Lecture content with or without Live Query and Response with Blackboard content, with or without Live Audio and Video facility. It also provides student’s status monitoring. After live class is over, the teacher has the facility to combine prepared Lecture material with interactive Live Class’s content, thus producing a new reference material. Server Side Software manages attendance record of the students and provides browsing of Lecture material with merged Queries, after Live Class Sessions.