AN ASIA-WIDE DISTRIBUTED HANDS-ON WORKSHOP: SYNCHRONOUS LEARNING AND LARGE-SCALE COMPUTING LABORATORY

摘要

In a lack of educational resources and facilities for IT human resource development in developing regions, it is essential to explore new cost-effective models to efficiently utilize distributed teaching resources to create a learning environment that is approachable by region-wide learners. This paper proposes to design a distance learning system which incorporates a remote large-scale computing laboratory for Asia-wide learners to participate in a live hands-on IT education program. The work overcomes the well-known regional inadequate Internet quality that obstructs the development of distance learning by proposing IPv6 Multicast service over a broadcast satellite to best accommodate region-wide multipoint communications. The StarBED large-scale computing laboratory is integrated to provide high quality environment for remote hands-on exercises. In a highly distributed model of facilities and people, a supervision model is proposed to define class management structure and procedure. The proposed work was implemented in a 5-days workshop to train 42 learners from 16 institutions in 10 Asian countries with 5 remote lecturer sites from 4 Asian countries. Evaluation results have shown that the proposed model is practical and cost-effective for region-wide IT training. The design, implementation details and evaluations in this paper could be utilized for future researches of alternative models.