Research title: E-learning: Virtual Classroom as an Added Learning Platform in Higher Learning Institutions of Rwanda.

Abstract

Some of the challenges being face by the Ministry of Education (MoE) of Rwanda are the shortage of teachers, over-crowded classrooms and lack of teaching resources such as textbooks. Alternative teaching and learning platforms are needed to supplement traditional classroom teaching and learning. Virtual classrooms have been proven, in many countries, to offer an alternative teaching and learning platform for students and teachers to engage on an academic level. They have been a widely used in tertiary course delivery, such that some universities offer courses purely online. However, currently implementations required high bandwidth in order to support the communication tools that they offer, including voice and video conferencing, a shared whiteboard, instant messaging and file sharing. In many developing countries the high cost of broadband internet access is a major deterrent to the country’s broadband penetration rate. Users are opting to cheaper subscriptions plans at very slow dial –up speeds. This renders current implementations nonviable due to their high bandwidth requirements. As a result, virtual classroom applications that require minimal bandwidth have become necessary as a viable supplement to traditional classroom teaching and learning. Minimizing the bandwidth requirement of virtual classrooms is a key to its wide adoption by general users with low bandwidth speeds. One of the aims of this research is to study the use of the Virtual classroom platform; this method of facilitating whiteboard updates will require some level of intelligence on the client side to process the received text in order to update the whiteboard appropriately. The virtual classroom framework that is proposed leverages on the security provided by IP multimedia subsystem network as well as its ability to support simultaneous mode of communications (video, audio, text) through SIP. The delivery platforms are able to offer Quality of Service (QoS), Quality of Experience (QoE) and security. As real-time application, the research will propose frameworks that adhere to real-time communication time constraints. Upon completion of the research, an evaluation platform will be recommended for implemention and aiming to measure QoE of virtual classroom service.