Peer-to-peer just-in-time support for curriculum based learning

Abstract

In every learning situation, almost all students, at some time or another, come to the point where extra help is required to overcome a specific obstacle. Teachers in typical school environments are not usually able to support each and every student with all his or her difficulties. With the introduction of a wide range of learning methodologies over the Internet, the learning student must somehow be in a position to interact with the teacher to get the required support. In our project we attempted to create an Internet based student support system, where the learning student is able to ask his difficulties to a pool of teachers. The system supports only student to teacher interactions and the interactions are always completely secure and anonymous. All interactions between students and teachers are recorded for later usage. Apart from downloading the already available help, users can select different media types with which they can interact. Through the Open API of the media types, developers can design, implement and plug-in new media types. A load balancing policy is used to balance the load of student questions amongst the teachers. XML documents are used to represent all the data which flows amongst the connected users. The project, with the help of the JXT A library, makes use of a Peer-to-Peer networking model, hence no centralised server is responsible for the virtual network.