The document proposes a model for a distance learning system leveraging the internet, focusing on real-time courses accessible from a global educational portal. It outlines necessary infrastructure, involving a capturing server and a streaming server, to enable the delivery of live and recorded classes to registered users. Future work is suggested to enhance the system's capabilities, including the development of additional Java programs for managing multimedia content and server communication.

1. A Model for a Distance Learning System over the Internet
Alessandro Brawerman, Cícero F. Marques, Rafael Ribeiro Macedo
Francisco J. K. G. Navarro Unibrasil, Information Systems
Positivo University, Information Systems rafa.osbourne@terra.com.br
{brawerman, cicero, fkantek}@up.edu.br
Abstract streaming servers, media synchronization mechanisms
and protocols for streaming media. For each area, they
This project proposes a model for a Distance Learning address the particular issues and review major
system over the Internet. The objective is to develop an approaches and mechanisms.
Internet portal in which educational institutions, pre- The authors of [5] discuss how the learning object
registered in the system, can offer real-time courses, paradigm can be exploited to support Web-based
previously recorded or being lively recorded, to users learning communities and on-line communities of
accessing the portal from anywhere in the world. practice, as a mean to enhance the services already
provided by educational portals.
Keywords: Distance learning, Internet, Streaming In [6] it was presented a Web educational portal
called e-teaching.org. This portal is considered the
central part of a project to foster the usage of new
1. Introduction media in German higher education. By strengthening
media competencies of academic teachers the
The Internet is yet a still-growing technology. There qualification initiative aims to promote new teaching
has been different kind of services being offered, not possibilities offered by multimedia technologies.
only data is transmitted over the World Wide Web, but Finally, in [7] the authors presented the
with wider bandwidth the so called multimedia development of a testbed for understanding the
communication services have emerged. Some vulnerabilities of IP-based multimedia networks. The
examples of these services are VoIP [1], IPTV [2], testbed includes a variety of PBX solutions using
video conference [3] and others. Asterisk, a multitude of voice and video IP phones,
Following the convergence of services fashion, this and multiple universities were connected through a
paper proposes a Distance Learning system over the secure VPN.
Internet. Through an Internet portal a user can access
real-time classes being transmitted from any registered 3. The System Specification
educational entity. The user, of course, might be in any
place of the world and also has to be registered in the The model of the system is defined with three main
database to have access to the educational portal. entities, the educational institution, which must be pre-
The portal might also be used as a virtual library, in registered in a database and may be located in any
which students may watch to different types of country of the world, the distributing server, which
educational video or listen to lectures recorded in an contains the portal and is accessed by the third entity,
audio format file. the user.
The rest of the paper in divided as follows, some of The infrastructure necessary on the educational
the related works are presented in section 2, section 3 institution side is depicted in Figure 1. It basically
brings the specification of the system and is followed accounts for some way to capture the classes, for
by the conclusion of the work. instance using a digital camcorder connected to a PC,
and a Java program, part of this project, which will
2. Related Work record the image in the capturing server.
In [4] the authors cover six key areas of streaming
video, video compression, application-layer QoS
control, continuous media distribution services,

2. Figure 1 Infrastructure necessary by the educational institution. Figure 3 The Internet portal interface
After capturing the contents the capturing server
sends the information to the streaming server which in 3. Conclusion and Future Work
time will make it available to the users. This step is
also managed by a Java program, part of this project. This paper presents a Distance Learning system
The capturing server runs the program in background over the Internet. Several users can access real-time
and when necessary the program connects to the classes being transmitted from any pre-registered
streaming server and sends the information. Figure 2 educational institution through the use of an Internet
shows this process. Notice that there must be portal. The infrastructure necessary to have the real-
bandwidth enough between these servers so that there time live communication working is described and the
is no great delay and performance loss. Also the reason need to have different servers, each performing a
to have a capturing server and a streaming server is specific function, is adopted. Suggestions to expand
simply to not overcharge the streaming server, which the portal´s utility, for instance working also as a
already performs a heavy load. virtual library, are proposed.
Future work includes the development of Java
programs to manage the recording of the multimedia
contents, to manage the communication between the
servers and to update the Internet portal dynamically.
References
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Figure 2 Connecting the servers Voice over IP Fundamentas (2nd Edition), Cisco Press, 2006.
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