Introduction to Virtual Educational Infrastructure

Grokworx Software has been around since the beginning of 2005. Our vision has been to build a complete turn-key virtual learning platform geared towards technical training. Our job is to make sure all of the components work together so our customers don't need to worry about the technology. Customers only need to focus on developing and delivering great content.
As an introduction lets go through the different components you need in order to deliver technical training.

• Web Portal
• Web Conferencing
• Audio Communication
• Lab Management

Web Portal

The purpose of the web portal is to glue the other components together into a single management interface used by administrators and event attendees. You want to make it as seamless as possible for everyone involved.

• Central repository for all of the course related resources (lab manuals, lab machines, evaluations, presentations, whitepapers, audio/video presentation, etc...).
• Event scheduling
• Registration system
• Payment processing
• Member management
• Lab Management

Web Conferencing

The web conferencing piece is used to deliver the presentation to the students. We have chosen to use Microsoft's Live Meeting (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/livemeeting/default.aspx) to provide this functionality. Live Meeting includes the following components.

• Multimedia Presentations
• Live Video Feeds
• Participant Feedback (Raise your hand)
• Recording and archiving
• Annotation
• Student Polling
• Integrated VOIP audio

Audio Communication

One of the key components to providing learning over the Internet is to provide good quality audio. The audio quality from the presenter is key here; "garbage in, garbage out" applies . If the instructor doesn't have a good clean audio stream, then the learning experience will be sub-optimal. It is important that the presenter use a telephone when delivering events.
Attendees also need a variety of different ways to get into the audio conference. A one size fits all approach doesn't work in this scenario:

• Call me – attendee provides number to call
• Direct dial number (800 service is nice for paying customers)
• Voice-over-IP (VOIP) support
• Most Web Conferencing platforms have built-in VOIP support
• Live Meeting has built-in VOIP support

This is a training event and not just a one way audio feed (webcast) and requires some special interaction.

• In order to simulate a live Instructor-Led Training you need to have two-way audio communications and encourage students ask verbal questions.
• Complete control of participants by Muting/un-muting
• Admin needs to remove the barking dog in the background....

Private conferencing rooms are the last piece in the audio equation to provide some much needed functionality:

• Technical support. With a group of 15 or 20 people taking training you can't have one person's problems affect the entire event. This person needs to get moved into a side room to help them resolve their technical challenges.
• Lab Assistance. When an attendee needs help during lab time you don't want to interrupt everyone else with unnecessary audio.
• Private questions. Generally, people don't like being exposed before their peers and prefer to ask some questions in private.

Lab Management

Technical training most likely requires attendees to have a lab machine to perform exercises, which reinforce what they learned during the lecture portion of the event. This is also the most complicated portion of delivering training around technical subjects.

Lab Management usually levergages software virtualization products like VMWare Workstation, VMWare Server, VMWare ESXi, MIcrosoft Virtual Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VirtualBox, Xen, KVM, etc.... In order to automate the provisioning of the student lab machines normally some sort of base template is configured, which can be automatically replicated numerous times.

Labs need to be consumed synchronously (during the scheduled event hours) and asynchronously (during non-class times). Whatever usage scenario it needs to support dynamic resource allocation. If you have 100 labs available, but only the resource capacity to run 10 simultaneous connections, then you need a way to manage those.

A lab management system needs to support some sort of demand queueing in case demand exceeds the amount of available resources.
As we expand out the Virtual Educational Infrastructure blog we will be spending quite a bit of time around the Lab Management component.