In Brazil (and probably elsewhere) we are facing serious issues with remote education. Many students rely on 3G/4G connections with data limits and teachers are having a hard time delivering content.<p>For video lessons, I have been using ffmpeg to segment and compress lessons with -stillimage and the lowest bitrates possible to distribute via WhatsApp, as some ISPs don't charge for data on this popular platform.<p>However, me and my peers have not been able to find a solution for minimal-bandwidth conferencing, sharing only audio and still image content (slide lessons) and running on cheap Android phones and tablets. Do you know such tool/plataform, have any suggestions for alternatives or open source projects that could be easily adapted for this purpose, or can actually build a minimal solution that is suitable for this? If so, you could be really help people in poor countries.<p>It saddens me so much that people are being left out, poverty is on the rise and education is just being neglected. Hope I can get some good use of the intelligence pool here!
Hey! It saddens me too that education quality is suffering because of this.<p>I am working on a tool to solve the exact problem you have. It's called vlokit [0]. It's an async video chat platform. You can easily upload video, screenshare, audio. It's almost instant. Your kids can go through the content and reply back with audio/video/screenshare within the same thread.<p>We have seen educators in Asia use our platform to conduct complete classes on vlokit. Kids access our platforms on cheap android phones. It's great because we're have mobile-friendly website and the content works amazingly well on low-bandwidth connections as well.<p>Let me know if you need help setting this up. I think it'll be incredibly useful for you.<p>[0] <a href="https://vlokit.com" rel="nofollow">https://vlokit.com</a>
Fully offline is great, because students get the full experience, and access it repeatedly without cost -- so lots of pre-downloaded material. Downloaded HTML and still images, or pdfs are great for mobile phone viewing<p>Then chat apps such as email or messaging systems are especially great, because when the network drops, nothing is lost and the conversation can resume later<p>I would suggest teachers do this, possibly with telegram channels or similar. That way the class can have a group to participate in and share problems. Could this be the kind of confrencing you're after. It is as low bandwidth as it gets, resilient against network failure, and allows real time chat in a group...<p>Often more directivity is wanted though.... One option might be teachers recording audio-visual videos (their voice + preferably blank background slideshow as the visual). Which I think you're already doing<p>Another option is voip. Which is already heavily optimized for low bandwidth. Something like [1] or the team chat options computer gamers use. Onething to consider is if it is possible to record the audio session for later download -- since it is frustrating for students who can't get in reception range or if the audio drops out -- but a download might let them catch what they missed. If that would be useful to you, I don't know. But I suggest browsing the voip options, since there are many<p>I'm a programmer. But none of my suggestions involve programming, or creating new apps. There are good reasons for this. 1) It is a lot of work. 2) Students would need to download and learn them. 3)
Existing apps they know fix some of these problems really well<p>One final suggestion. Try zoom, with video disabled, and the shared screen view for teacher to draw on. If this doesn't work for you, then probably no custom app is going to either<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software)</a>