25 POINTS TO CONSIDER WHILE SELECTING E-LEARNING PLATFORM
1. FREE ACCESS FROM ANYWHERE OVER INTERNET
It should enable free access for anyone globally over the internet. The Video conferencing solution required for accessing lectures at client end should be absolutely free so that students, and guest lecturers can be invited from anywhere across the world easily, and not restricted to few fixed locations only.
2. FULL HD QUALITY
The Video conferencing solution should deliver Full HD Quality so that during regular delivery of lectures, the teacher writing on blackboard or white board with marker can be viewed in high quality at all the remote locations and the sharpness of text written on whiteboard should be crystal clear and not blurry. The video and audio quality should be live without any delays, so that students get a feeling of being in the same class where the teacher is present. If there are audio video delays or audio drops or video is blurry, the students won't be comfortable and they will request management to stop such classes as their focus instead of being on the topic gets deviated to the audio issues or blurred video quality.
3. WORK ON LOW BANDWIDTH OF EVEN 50KBPS
The technology used should be such that even at very low bandwidth the audio video quality is not compromised and lectures go flawless. Only then the students or remote campuses where only basic broadband is available can also take full advantage of The Video Conferencing Solution. The Video Conferencing Solution implemented at these locations should have inbuilt digital whiteboard and presentation sharing capability at very low bandwidth and also possibility to manually reduce the resolution of video so that such classes even at as low as 50-80kbps bandwidth can work smoothly.
4. WORK ON ALL NETWORK TYPES
The classes should be able to connect from any network type- be it MPLS, VPN, LAN, Home Broadband or even wireless data cards.
5. INBUILT RECORDING CAPABILITY AT NO EXTRA COST
The Video Conferencing Solution should have inbuilt capability to record the complete lectures and directly store on the computer instead of external expensive hardware based recording solutions which have limited recording capability.
6. REPLAY RECORDED VIDEOS & VIDEO FILE SHARING
The Video Conferencing Solution should also have capability to play recorded lectures for students who have missed the lecture due to any reason or for student’s revision purpose. Students can login at a designated time and videos can be played again.
7. LIVE FULL DUPLEX TEACHER-STUDENT INTERACTION
The Video Conferencing Solution should have capability to see all locations or remote classroom videos at the same time with full duplex teacher-student Interaction to achieve high performance e learning sessions.
8. LIVE DISTANCE LEARNING AT LOW COST
For students who want to attend classes from home as individuals, The Video Conferencing Solution should allow login for such students at low cost with at least audio capability so that they can see and hear the teacher and ask questions in full duplex mode flawlessly.
9. INBUILT ATTENDANCE MEASUREMENT AT NO EXTRA COST
For students logging into the remote classrooms from various locations, The Video Conferencing Solution should also have inbuilt attendance measurement system so that with one click attendance of all students can be downloaded in excel.
10. INBUILT TEST AND EVALUATION
For remote students The Video Conferencing Solution should have inbuilt online evaluation system so that live test can be conducted online which has options for both multiple choice questions and descriptive questions. The complete consolidated question-answer sheet which will also record the name of student automatically on them should be available to the teacher immediately after the test so that it can be checked and reviewed.
11. MUTE ALL FEATURE WITH HAND RAISING OPTION
During ongoing remote classroom session, the video conferencing system should enable mute all capability so that multiple students don't talk at the same time and disturb the flow of class but should allow hand raising feature so that the teacher can understand that someone wants to ask a question.
12. CO-BROWSING AND INBUILT DIGITAL WHITEBOARD
During the video conferencing class, the system should have inbuilt capability to search live content from search engines and browse along with students and also capability to copy paste the content on digital white board so that , the teacher can elaborate it and write on it and do annotations etc.
13. DOCUMENT SCANNING & SHARING
The Video conferencing System should also have inbuilt capability to scan some useful document from a text book /handwritten notes etc and instantaneously share the documents through The Video Conferencing Solution to all participants.
14. LIVE STREAM VIDEO FILES
The Video Conferencing Solution should have capability to Live stream educational movies to all participants. During the movies the teacher should be able to pause the movie at important moments and explain those topics better and then again play it.
15. H.323 CONNECTIVITY TO HARDWARE BASED VIDEO CONFERENCING SOLUTIONS
The Video Conferencing Solution should have inbuilt capability of having H.323 connectivity so that in case a guest lecturer from a different university needs to be invited on video conference and they already have some other hardware based video conference implemented which they want to use for this session, the software solution should be able to invite the old hardware Solution into the same meeting.
16. VOTING OPTION
The Video Conferencing Solution should also offer referendum functionality so that topics on which the teacher needs to quickly understand how many students are in favour or against it, the same can be immediately achieved with click of button. For topics where suggestion from the students needs to be obtained or has multiple choices, the polling feature should also be available.
17. ALL WEB & DATA CONFERENCING FEATURES WITH ANNOTATIONS AT NO EXTRA COST
The Video Conferencing Solution should have all web & Data Conferencing features like Desktop Sharing, Application Sharing, Sharing of word documents, excel, ppts etc at no extra cost. Further with help of Annotations, the Video Conferencing Solution should also have capability to train remote students on "specific application” or Topic and annotations should be made available to have the students to focus on a particular portion of the application.
18. PRIVATE COMMUNICATION WITH SINGLE STUDENT
The Video Conferencing Solution should have capability to train all participants on specific application as well as simultaneously allow the teacher to share another application with a specific student (this is useful for giving attention to a specific student who is lagging behind on a particular topic and needs one to one attention to clarify doubts).. The system should also support private communication with this student only through private text chat without disturbing rest of class.
19. EASY TO USE & REMOTE TROUBLESHOOTING
The Video Conferencing solution should be very simple to use so that teachers & students can quickly get used to it. If any issue arises during the remote classroom sessions, the need to send engineers physically to all locations can be quite time consuming. Instead the video conferencing solution should have the capability to resolve most of the issues on remote level itself via remote troubleshooting tools saving a lot of time.
20. VIEW EACH LOCATION ON SEPARATE DISPLAY
In a teaching environment which involves connecting high end multiple classrooms where each class has 40-50 students, seeing all classroom videos in single screen will make size of each video too small and students from each class will not be visible to the teacher. To handle such scenarios The Video Conferencing Solution should have capability to view each remote classroom video on separate displays. The Video Conferencing Solution should offer capability to connect multiple such displays so that all students are clearly visible from each class.
21. REMOTE CONTROL OF PTZ CAMERAS
The solution should allow you to connect HD PTZ video conference Cameras and High quality HD audio devices for large classroom environment without any extra modules and Teacher should be able to remotely Control (Pan, Tilt and Zoom) the camera to the student asking the question from a remote classroom directly from his location, without the need of dedicated resource who needs to otherwise do it with a remote control available at their end.
22. INTEGRATION WITH LOGIC BOX SYSTEM
The PTZ Cameras should also be integrable with Logic Box button system which allows a push button to be embedded in each Desk having group of students and the moment someone asks the question, he presses the button and automatically the camera rotates and zooms onto a particular participant.
23. NOT ALLOWING UNAUTHORIZED STUDENTS TO LOGIN
Solution should have Lock conference feature inbuilt so that once all the authorised participants have logged into the conference, by simply pressing button Lock conference no other unauthorised student should be able to enter the class even if he knows the user name and password.
24. VIDEO ROTATION
In a scenario where more than 20 remote classrooms are involved in a single secession, watching all remote videos together becomes very difficult for trainer both in terms of bandwidth requirement and also with more videos open; size of video becomes small and not properly visible. Alternatively, If only few classrooms are viewed then other classrooms may start creating indiscipline as they know they are not getting watched. To address such scenario, Solution should have inbuilt Video rotation function which should allow Trainers video to be in fixed mode visible to all locations at all time and other video should keep on randomly showing videos of remote classroom after few seconds ( time interval should be self configurable). This will solve both bandwidth issues and also keep all students of remote classrooms alert.
System Broadcast
In a typical real time classroom environment the moment the lecture time is over the Bell rings to remind the teachers that it is time to windup the secession and , In a Virtual classroom environment no of Ports/Licenses available on server will be limited and have to be utilized by different teachers and students at specific time, In a scenario if one teacher continues to extend his class beyond the limit, there should be a provision provided by the system to send a broadcast message which can popup in front of teacher and students inside the application requesting them to windup the secession.
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