Minimum Cost Multiple Connections in a Wide Distance Learning System

New technologies and particularly the information and communication technologies (ICT) have influenced almost all human activities, such as research, the financial world, entertainment and evidently education. Specifically in the domain of education ICT have given a new motivation to distance education and training. It is well known that distance education is being propagated around the world at a fast and impressive rate and contributes to the improvement of the culture in general. A distance educational system can be modeled in a unified way so as to comprise one or more providers which play the role of educational centers as well as a set of students who will communicate on line with the providers. In general it is assumed that every educational center offers diverse courses and every student requests certain courses offered by different centers. Since distance education is also combined with classical face to face training, the educational resources of the centers are limited, meaning that every center can simultaneously train a limited number of students. In addition we can make the realistic assumption that the attendance of a student to a specific course at a particular provider has a fixed price. In this paper we develop a greedy algorithm, that gives a feasible solution, whenever such a solution exists which detects the set of triplets student-course-center that has the greatest reduction on the total cost of a large training program and which gives an approximate optimal solution