SUPPORTING ONLINE LEARNING TEAMS USING P2P TECHNOLOGIESFatos Xhafa
Santi Caballé
Leonard Barolli
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P2P systems have become popular for file sharing among Internet users. Due to improvement on network communications and the processing power of desktop machines, there is an increasing interest in exploring P2P technologies for developing groupware tools to support eLearning. Nowadays most online learning systems are centralized web-based, which show several limitations such as maintenance cost, scalability and having a single point of failure. P2P technologies are an important alternative to develop decentralized online learning systems in which students can be more than mere clients and can use their own computational resources for task accomplishment during online learning process. Unfortunately, current P2P systems cannot be used in a straightforward way for supporting real online teams since they cannot be customized for small group purposes and there are important security issues in such systems. In this paper we will present the design and implementation of groupware tools using a JXTA-based P2P platform, called JXTA-Overlay. We build on previous work in which JXTA-Overlay was successfully used for developing a customized file sharing system. The current paper will present the design and implementation of new groupware tools for online teams of a virtual campus. The proposed groupware tools include communication tools such as messaging and rooms and tools for learning scenario. By using the system, the members of a small online team of students can create learning scenarios corresponding to common work projects arising in online learning; then, they can use the learning scenario to define, assign and track a set of tasks within the learning scenario assigned to the members of the group. All in all, this work is a step towards using P2P technologies in the design and implementation of decentralized online learning systems. |
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