A low cost low bandwidth real-time virtual classroom system for distance learning

Virtual classroom teaching or E-learning is one of the best solutions for erasing the curse of the illiteracy of a large population in many developing countries. Most of the E-learning or virtual classroom teaching tools demand high requirement of system resources because live video streaming consumes high bandwidth resulting huge costs. The major challenge of the virtual classroom teaching environment is to design a low cost low bandwidth application. In this paper we propose an internet based solution where only voice is streamed over the network using UDP protocol. Teacher and students establish a TCP connection to transfer the visual aid which is encoded properly to protect Intellectual property. The teacher solely controls the visual aids. Control events of the visual aids are captured by the application and very small sized corresponding messages are transferred to all the students where by recognizing the messages appropriate events are invoked to reflect the same event as the teacher end. So the major traffic for this application is voice packets and some small sized control messages which require considerably low bandwidth.