INTERNET AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ADAPTATION FOR QUALITY EDUCATION(1)

Abstract
With the availability of reasonably cost-effective servers, computing facilities and a fairly reliable and wide spread telecommunication and data network infrastructure, the emergence of "Virtual Technological Institution" is a distinct reality. In this paper we present a model which has been used to implement the features of the conventional education system over Internet.

Key Words: Virtual University, Virtual Classroom, Multimedia Tool, Video Conferencing, Whiteboard, Software Solution

1. Introduction
Quality education to increasingly large and diverse student population is posing serious problems for academia, especially in the developing world where sufficient infrastructure is yet not in place. A case under consideration is the acute shortage of quality manpower to take care of various facets of the IT industry. The Internet and Information Technology, which have unleashed unprecedented changes in all walks of life including making inroads in higher education sector, may be harnessed to solve the problem.

Specifically, the demand of the time is: 1) how to provide quality education to a large set; and 2) how to improve the efficiency of the delivery for the purpose. Many researchers all over have addressed to these issues. Numerous solutions have been provided ranging from a simple local bulletin board system to that based on global Internet and World Wide Web.

A very important ingredient of any solution to a technological university is the requirement of a powerful interaction in the form of group activity and the feedback from the participants. Keeping all these factors in mind we have attempted to implement a Virtual University Concept.

In this paper we present a model, which mimics all the functionalities of a technological university. In Section 2, we describe the Model. Section 3 covers the implementation. The Management System is described in Section 4. Features of the Virtual Classroom are listed in Section 5.

2. The Model

In a conventional system a student enrolls for a certain number of courses, attends lectures, asks questions, listens to his fellow students asking questions, participates in a discussion, submits assignments and appears at examinations to earn credits. We have developed a system over Microsoft Windows platform providing a truly interactive live session between the teacher and the students. The interaction is through text, viewgraphs, graphics, free-hand drawing/writing, voice, audio and video. A database server with database manager (SQL) provides web-based administrative chores like registration, browsing of lecture materials and downloading of pre-recorded lectures etc. Lectures are given from a teacher's console and received on students' consoles and imitate a real classroom scenario.

We have implemented this model which is currently undergoing field trials. In this paper we describe the model and it's implementation. Fig1.
gives a typical model of functioning of conventional brick and mortar institute. Fig 2. presents the model, which mimics the conventional institute of Fig1 in a software solution using underlying Internet technology.

3. The Implementation

The Remote Tutor is a complete solution for implementing Virtual Institute over Internet. It consists of two parts, a multimedia tool which resembles a virtual classroom over a network and an administrative server called Lecture Manager Server (LMS). While LMS takes care of all administrative and management related function of an e-learning enterprise, the multimedia tool is used for multiple concurrent sessions of virtual classroom.

The LMS is implemented over an NT or Unix server and requires an ftp server, web server and database server for complete operation of Lecture Manager Server. The LMS software constitutes of scripts, which implement the different functionality, offered by the LMS server.

The Administrator of the Virtual University controls the registration of Tutor and Students with the Server. Depending on the availability of the teachers, the courses are floated by the Administrator of the Virtual University. A new teacher can apply for registration through web-based access to the Virtual University Server. After registering with the server, a new tutor can select to offer any of the existing lists of courses or a new course subject to approval by the administrator of the LMS.

When a student registers with the Virtual University by filling up the registration form through web based access to the server, he also selects the list of courses he wishes to register for, taking care of time-table clash etc. He has to satisfy the prerequisites for registering a course. Once the student/tutor is registered with the server, they get access to number of features available with the server, which are listed in detail in Section 4.

For attending the virtual classroom a student or a tutor needs a multimedia PC with sound card and video camera. The classroom application has been designed over microsoft windows platform. When a tutor/student joins the session (Virtual Classroom) by invoking the multimedia application of the Remote Tutor, the application, the list of live sessions or sessions to start is shown by the application. This is obtained from the session info being sent on a predefined multicast address by the Server using the Session Description Protocol.

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