The growth of the Internet has promoted the creation of many tools to allow geographically dispersed groups to collaborate on the same project (eg: Marratech [1], Skype [2] or Messenger [3]). However, the lack of user privileges for different actors and the absence of control over the resources used by them is a barrier for their use in the educational environment. Indeed, there are other tools such as virtual campus, forums [4, 5], etc. which offer a greater control and differentiation among users but lack the ability for on-line interaction in comparison with the afore mentioned.

In this document we present a tool for providing a controlled and interactive environment for teachers and students that emulates the functionality of a real classroom. A good efficiency is obtained by distributing the workload among the teacher’s client’s machines.

The client has been designed with a modular architecture, multilingual interface and configurable look-and-feel. New functionality can be easily extended with new features by means of a plug-ins system. The interaction between the plug-ins and the system is done through an API that gives access to both the graphical user interface and the messaging system. In order to connect them, there is a system in charge of catching and distributing different events so as to notify the plug-ins about them.

As proof of concept, several plug-ins have been implemented for commonly used tools:

* Chat: Transmits text messages between the users of a classroom, or privately between the teacher and an individual student

* Audio: Distributes the teacher’s voice and allows students to request active participation in the lesson.

* Video: On-line video broadcasting with configurable set-up to adapt the performance to different networks bandwidth.

* Whiteboard: This plug-in provides a workspace where teacher and students (under supervision) can expose their ideas graphically.

* Slide-presentations: for dynamic remote presentations. A pre-load strategy (next slide is sent in advance) is used to reduce network latency. An arrow-pointer is visible on the student’s client allowing the teacher to call the attention on specific details.

* Test: Evaluation system with a countdown timer and traditional quiz cases with statistical reports of the results.

In summary, the tool here presented provides a platform on which on-line lectures with the on-line participation of students can take place. High performance is obtained by distributing the computational workload over the different teachers in the active classrooms. An internal plug-in system allows extending the tool with new functions. Several plug-ins, such as an interactive whiteboard, presentations, audio, video, chat and tests have been successfully implemented and tested.

References

[1] Marratech http://www.marratech.com/
[2] Skype www.skype.com
[3] MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
[4] GroupLog: http://www.bath.ac.uk/e-learning/grouplog/
[5] 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].
[6] Hugo Rosales, Ismael del Águila, Maite Martínez Paradinas and Oswaldo Trelles; Synchronous distance learning platform: School goes home in Haemophilia”; World Federation of Haemophilia - World Congress - Vancouver 2006