Synchronization and Caching Solution for Cost-Effective E-Learning in Resource and Bandwidth Constrained Environments

Electronic learning (e-learning) content delivery and accessibility have received significant research attention over years in order to ensure reliability, availability and cost-effectiveness through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).The evolvement of mobile computing devices especially smartphones bring prospects in overcoming the inherent limitations of the Internet when accessing web contents.  Among the potential opportunity revealed includes the ability to work offline. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the existing online and offline e-learning systems in order to explore the uniqueness, technical problems and opportunities in this field. In the same vein, this study proposed synchronization and caching approach for cost-effective e-learning content delivery. The proposed approach synchronizes contents from the original server to local database in mobile computing devices in order to deliver contents to learners in a reliable, cost-effective and timely manner. Finally, comparing existing web-based learning system and the proposed approach, the analyzed results provide empirical evidence that, the proposed approach is significant for bandwidth usage cost saving and hence cost-effectiveness due to ability of working offline. Therefore, synchronization and caching approach cut down several limitations in existing e-learning systems including:  reduction of cost of bandwidth usage; improving system performance by cutting down the servers’ workload and internet usage overheads; cutting down costs of purchasing hardware and increasing motivation in learning activities by allowing learners to access learning contents anywhere and anytime. Keywords: synchronization and caching, e-learning, cost-effectiveness, content delivery, offline

Hoarding Content in M-Learning Context

With the advances in mobile technologies it is already possible to support learners and teachers activities on the move. We analyzed the functionalities that should be provided by a general mobile learning platform and identified a problem that is weakly studied by previous research, namely offline usage of learning material (hoarding of content). Hoarding can use some of the techniques that are used by different caching and pre-fetching schemas, but in most cases the goal of the last two is to reduce latency time, bandwidth consumption and/or servers workload, while in hoarding the aim is to improve the accuracy of set selection. Caching and pre-fetching content are problems that are considered widely since the introduction of Internet for mass usage, still hoarding is not so well explored. We want to study the parameters that could help a hoarding algorithm improvement in order to cover the peculiarity in m-learning scenario. Our goal is to provide an efficient strategy, taking into account additional parameters, extracted automatically by the system