Online teaching platform

Current solutions for online teaching are far from perfect, as explained in this blog (in French). That's why I'm using my own online teaching setup, which is based as much as possible on open-source servers, and which is designed to give the best possible interactive experience to students even with low-bandwidth connection.

The core element of this setup is reveal.js and my improved multiplex plugin, which enables to distribute HTML slides. The following diagram describes the various components of my setup:

This setup is not as complex as it looks like to install, and it gives students richer interactive features than with traditional video-based solutions, such as:

• Students may go back and forth in the material at their wish, while still benefiting from automatic synchronization when the master moves from one slide to the next one.
• The professor may draw directly on the slides, and the drawings are automatically transferred on the students' terminal at a very low bandwidth.
• The professor may create instantaneous polls, just by pressing a key, wich appears on the students' terminal as an overlay HTML window with buttons they can click on.
• The teacher may stream his own terminal in real time directly within the slides. The stream is in text mode (with colours), so that the students may copy-paste some content from this terminal.
• The visual quality at the students' terminal is always perfect, even with hundreds of students and even with extremely low-bandwidth connections (the bottleneck in this setup is by far the audio stream, which may be replaced with pre-recorded audio comments if really required).

So far, this setup is home-made, but I would like to build an easy-to-use and easy-to-install platform, potentially based on the OLKi federated content storage platform to host the educational content in a decentralized network. If you're interested, please contact me !