Case Study

Abstract

Collaborative peer-to-peer ( P2P ) interaction is an important pedagogic principle of reflective learning. In distance and tele-education systems, collaborative learning plays a more significant role than interaction among students and instructors in accessing learning objects. Some systems, like Coursera, are asynchronous. These systems support a self-paced study by the students. The case study presents the methods used to implement the P2P interactive tele-education system. The study focuses primarily on P2P architecture and synchronization methods. The peer to peer interactive presentation system ( P2P-IPS ) system preserves causality between ask and doubt and its resolution while disseminating them to all the participants. A buffered approach is employed to enhance the performance of the P2P shared whiteboard, which may be used either in tandem with live media streaming or in standalone mode. The proposed system further extends P2P interactions on stored contents (files) built on a P2P file sharing and searching module with additional features. The added features allow the creation of mash-up presentations with annotations, posts, comments on audio, video, and PDF files, as well as a discussion forum. We have implemented the P2P file sharing and searching system on the de Bruijn graph-based overlay for low latency. Extensive experiments were carried out on Emulab to validate the P2P-PS system using 200 physical nodes.