Virtual Class Room System

Category: Application Development, Enterprise.

Objective:

          Developing a virtual classroom system to promote a greater count of students to splurge into the field of Education. It integrates the benefits of a physical classroom with the convenience of a ‘no-physical-bar’ virtual learning environment, minus the commuting hazards and expenses. It will usher in the immense flexibility and sophistication in the existing learning platform structures, with the perfect blend of synchronous and asynchronous interaction. It provides a means of collaborative learning for the students.

Functional Requirements:

·         Students can choose courses

·         Registration for Multiple Courses

·         Attend lectures either at the scheduled time or on request view lecture at a later time.

·         Faculties can take lectures, upload assignments, announcements, evaluate answer sheets and also can upload lectures and other discussions in various formats as in videos, power point presentation etc.

·         Upload and Download of various assignments, college notices,

Student’s notices, journals, videos.

·         Real Time collaboration among – A/B via mails, shared and interactive whiteboards

·         Asynchronous communication in the form of Emails, discussion boards that enable communication to occur at "convenient-times" that suit student schedules and are not accessed at simultaneous or prearranged times.

·         There can be forums, blogs etc to discuss various queries and to put up suggestions posted both by students and teachers

·         Administrator can generate reports

·         Shared documents and media library that can help in active learning of a student

·         Users must have valid User ID and password to login thus creating their individual profiles.

·         Students can take up various quizzes which can help them to realize their inbuilt talents in various fields.

 Non Functional Requirements:

·         Secure access of confidential data (user’s details). SSL can be used.

·         24 X 7 availability

·         Better component design to get better performance at peak time

·         Flexible service based architecture will be highly desirable for future extension

THE EXISTING SYSTEM

          The present system is a manual system or a semi-automated system. Manual system involves paper work in the form of maintaining various files and manuals. Maintaining critical information in the files and manuals is full of risk and a tedious process.

• The existing system needs to save his information in the form of excel sheets or Disk Drives.
• There is no sharing is possible if the data is in the form of paper or Disk drives.
• The manual system gives us very less security for saving data; some data may be lost due to mismanagement.
• It’s a limited system and fewer users friendly.
• Searching of particular information is very critical it takes lot of time.
• In the existing system students need to learn course in the class room only.
• In the manual system student need bare the lot of time and cost.
• The existing system need to travel to a location in which to participate in the course or lessons.
• There is no direct interaction provided between faculties and students.
• Exam conducting and result announcement is a tedious process.

PRPOSED SYSTEM

          The development of this new system contains the following activities, which try to automate the entire process keeping in the view of database integration approach.

• User Friendliness is provided in the application with various controls provided by system Rich User Interface.
• The system makes the overall project management much easier and flexible.
• It can be accessed over the Intranet.
• The user information files can be stored in centralized database which can be maintained by the system.
• This can give the good security for user information because data is not in client machine.
• Authentication is provided for this application only registered members can access.

As the virtual classroom is one that aims to give the student an experience equal to or better than the sort they would find in a traditional classroom, there are obviously many advantages of the virtual classroom to the student, as well as the teacher (or instructor) and the associated educational institution.

Advantages for Students

          For students of virtual classrooms, advantages primarily concern access, time, and cost factors compared to those incurred from attending the traditional, physical classroom.

          Virtual classrooms remove the need to travel to a location in which to participate in the course or lessons, thus they are an advantage to students as they can be accessed from the student’s home and they do not have to pay for transport as they would if they were attending a traditional classroom. Virtual classrooms can be accessed from any computer that has the necessary software, hardware, Internet connection, and Internet browser requirements in order to participate in the virtual classroom.

Discussions and chat can be archived in the virtual classroom for instant reviewing, which is another advantage to students. The minimal time needed to participate in a virtual classroom is an advantage to students. Virtual classrooms are also diverse; students from many geographical locations can enroll in the virtual classroom, which gives students the advantage of working with others that bring different ideas and backgrounds to collaborative learning activities and projects, thus presenting possibilities and interests in fields not previously considered.

Advantages for Faculties

          For teachers of virtual classrooms, working part-time is a possibility because of the flexible nature of the classroom. The teacher is not required to work from an office or classroom to instruct lessons or organize material and lessons; this can be done from anywhere where they have access to a computer with an Internet connection and other necessary software/hardware, which is an advantage.

Electronic content can be updated more efficiently than printed material, and at a lower cost, which saves the teacher time and money when preparing and adjusting material to suit their lessons and courses within their virtual classroom. Changes or updates in anything within the virtual classroom are instantly accessible to everyone enrolled in the classroom. This “ease of update” is an advantage to the teacher, and also to the student, who will be receiving, and learning with, up-to-date examples.

          Another advantage to the teacher or instructor is that they have “time to respond to student communications” in the virtual classroom, which gives the teacher a chance to construct the best possible response to the student. This is often not possible in a traditional classroom, as issues are raised face-to-face where answers are expected straight away. In the virtual classroom time delays between student’s questions and teacher’s answers are expected; this is the nature of the virtual classroom.

NUMBER OF MODULES

The system after careful analysis has been identified to be presented with the following modules:

• Administrators /Managers
• Faculties
• Students
• Web Registration
• Virtual Training
• Exam Conducting
• Search
• Reports
• Authentication

Web Registration

          The system has a process of registration.  Every student need to submit his complete details in the form of registration.  Whenever a student registration completed automatically student can get a user id and password.  By using that user id and password student can log into the system.  If registration process is completed successfully an email remainder is generated and sends to the citizen.

Administrators

          Administrator is treated as a super user in this system.  He can have all the privileges to do anything in this system.  Admin can prepare course curriculum, along with course content by the help of the faculties. He can collect the course video’s and stored into in the centralized database.

          Another tasks done by the administrator is he can generates reports, log files, backup, recovery of data any time. 

Faculty

          Faculties can take lectures, uploads assignments, announcements, evaluate answer sheets and also upload lectures, and other discussions in various formats as in the form of videos and power point presentations.

Students

          Students can choose courses, attend lectures, take exams, and view their attendance records, progress reports as per their convenience through this system only.

          One student can register multiple courses. Take their classes on the schedule time or later their convenience. By using the system interface student learn the courses properly and attend the exams as an online mode.  Results will be announced through online only.

Virtual Training

          Asynchronous communication in the form of emails, discussion boards that enable communication to occur at “convenient-times” that suit student schedules and are not accessed at simultaneous or prearranged times.

Exam Conducting

          When ever a student is completed his course, an exam should be conducted, students need to attend the exam properly. It’s an online exam. The results will be announced later after the papers are evaluated by the faculties.

Reports

          Different kind of reports is generated by the system.

·         Student Progress report Request.

·         Faculty performance report.

·         Time based and request attendance reports for the students.

Authentication

        Authentication is nothing but providing security to the system. Here every must enter into the system throw login page.  The login page will restrict the UN authorized users.  A user must provide his credential like user Id and password for log into the system. For that the system maintains data for all users.  Whenever a user enters his user id and password, it checks in the database for user existence.  If the user is exists he can be treated as a valid user. Otherwise the request will throw back.

KEYWORDS:

Generic Technology Keywords: Database, User Interface, Programming

Specific Technology Keywords: Asp.Net 3.5, C#.Net, MS SqlServer-05

Project Keywords: Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing

SDLC Keywords: Presentation, Business Object, Data Access Layer

ENVIRONMENT:

Servers:

            Operating System Server: Windows XP or later

            Database Server: Microsoft SQL Server-2005

            Client: Microsoft Internet Explorer

            Tools: Microsoft Visual Studio .Net-2008

            User Interface: Asp.Net with Ajax

            Code Behind: VC#.Net

Hardware Specification:

Processor: Intel Pentium or More

RAM: 512 MB Ram

Hard Disk: PC with 20GB