Virtual schools using locolms to enhance learning in the least developed countries

Abstract

The long-time traditional classroom mode of education has been struggling a lot to cope up with low educational budgets, especially among the least developed countries (LDCs), against the disproportionate, exponential population-growth rate to support the expected increase in both the classroom spaces and the training of educators. This chapter discusses local college learning management system (LoColms) for cheap delivery of rich, full-motion video contents, usually of prohibitive costs, to virtual schools in the poor communities. LoColms is a learning management system that can be used to support a scenario of virtual schools whereby learners can watch educator's demonstrations. It provides a much better learning environment. This solution also addresses the cost issues that come with video-resource delivery that is achieved by employing proxy cache servers and multimedia stream storage servers, and point-to-point communication protocol (PPP) technologies over the ubiquitous public switched telephone network (PSTN), which, in most of the least developed countries, are now fully digital and have sufficient bandwidth. With this approach, LDCs' governments can save in two major areas: on the budgets involved in training and salary payments of many teachers, and on procurement of scholastic materials such as text books, chalks, etc., and lesser classroom space would be required as classes can go on for 24 hours every day, as no educator would be physically required, as the contents would be asynchronously accessed from the proxy cache server.