proprietary educational systems with high video content?

[oceanlove]

hello!

I was wondering if you can load your own educational software and video content or if you were limited to what comes 'off the shelf' with Rachel PI. eg: offline Khan Academy Video collection.

Also, if a user has neither access to local network or a wireless connection, is Rachel PI a usable resource? assuming custom videos are needed.

Lastly, with only 32GB of storage space how are thousands of videos loaded onto Rachel Pi....are they compressed and have to be downloaded individually?

I am helping a friend build an e-learning platform that would involve 50 hours of video and local network or a wireless connections might not always be possible....so I am wondering if the only solution is an external hard drive or if Rachel PI can help somehow.

Thanks so much for your help!

[Jeremy Schwartz]

Hi Dorothy,

It's pretty easy to add your videos to RACHEL-Pi, there are instructions on RACHEL Pi how to do it once you connect. 

The standard videos are already included in RACHEL.  They're about 4MB each.  32GB is about 32,000MB so you can get about 10,000 videos there (though there are other resources).  Most people use our 64GB distribution also.

I guess I'm not sure about your question of not having access to a local network.  What devices would you be using to watch the videos?

Best,
Jeremy

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[T Gillett]

Hi Dorothy

If you are interested in simply serving short videos and static web content, you may be interested in using this device as an alternative to the RPi:

    http://wiki.villagetelco.org/RACHEL_on_MP2

It is a very simple and robust wifi router that is set up to serve basic content to small groups of users in a straightforward and stand alone manner. It has been developed with the intention of using it in remote and rural schools where there is no Internet access.

It does not do the more advanced functions that RACHEL Pi offers, such as Search across wiki text or the KA Lite application. But for simple serving of static content and short videos it is quite effective.

The VT project plans to offer the unit pre-programmed and with the standard 32GB RACHEL library on board as a 'turn key' appliance via their on line store shortly.

As Jeremy has mentioned, adding your own content is fairly straightforward. As well as the built-in facility in RACHEL Pi, you can put the SD card in your PC and add and remove files as required.

If you are adding a whole set of video files, you will probably need to also have a HTML web page to allow users to navigate to the video that they want to view.

Something else to consider is the size of the video files. Many training systems use a collection of short videos around 5 - 10MB in size, and this works well in these simple systems. The Khan Academy videos are a good example of this.

But if your content provider is making 'feature length' videos that are hundreds of MB in size, then you may run into issues effectively serving the content to a group of users.

Regards

Terry

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[oceanlove]

What devices would you be using to watch the videos?

 

Hi Jeremy, the end users would be using Raspberry PI computers, likely the B+. There is a possibility of getting Tablets but for now we must run the application on the Raspberry PIs 

Can you recommend a Learning Management System  (or a resource/forum/etc that may have ideas) that has been successfully implemented a LMS on a Raspberry PI computer where the content is accessible  offline (via a SD card etc) and/or shared with other users via a Rachel PI (to create wifi hotspot and let others access the software without needing an internet connection). 

The mission of the program is to teach women in Africa entrepreneurship skills. We are assuming many remote villages in Africa do not have a LAN or strong wifi accessibility.  

I am familiar with Moodle, but am worried it is too resource intensive without having an external hard drive attached. Or would users recommend coding a solution from scratch; my only concern there is that Moodle is 200K+ lines of code which was estimated to cost 7MM+ as a development effort if it had not been open source.

Thanks for any ideas/suggestions you may have!

[Jeremy Schwartz]

So you need individual users to have logins to the LMS?

With RACHEL you could load all the videos up to share with other Pi clients (all offline).  With Moodle you get exercises and individual logins.  You want something in between the two, right?  Your best bet is going to be on the raspberry pi forums, they're a very robust community

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[Jeremy Schwartz]

You can also talk to Foundation for Learning Equality, the creators of KA-Lite.  I believe they are trying to open their platform to allow for any content, not just Khan.