Content area
Full text
Introduction
In regional Northern Territory, only 58.7% households reported they have internet access in 2016, which was far below 78.8% Australian average (Information Decisions, 2016). That means, internet connection is a major problem for people there and this affects equality of accessing learning resources for tertiary students in regional Northern Territory. Those who can access the internet in remote area do so through: satellite, connections which are vulnerable to bad weather; sometimes microwave links but these cannot reach long distance without repeaters; and very rarely, cables installed in the area, such as for mining companies. Then they need to install and pay for a Wi-Fi hotspot in their home or community centre for educational use when studying. Their ability to make regular payments also may be irregular due to low income. Hence, even those with access will find it intermittent or need to travel to link in to an existing system.
Tertiary educational organisations can adapt existing learning management system (LMS) to remote users. With such a system, students can access learning materials, submit assignments and collaborate with others and education providers can share multimedia learning materials. Traditionally, LMSs focus on online collaborate learning. Even with the use of progressive web apps, the unit contents need to be downloaded by the students before moving offline, and then collaboration only occurs when they have internet access. In an offline environment there can be synchronization issues between students’ learning data and the lecturer’s course information unless this is developed with the context in mind. This becomes a challenge for education organisations delivering courses in remote regions where internet resource is limited.
The purpose of this study is to build a collaborative learning system that can work within an offline environment and share data asynchronously with other devices when it can access the internet. The system uses an open-source digital learning software called Moodle (Modular Object Oriented Developmental Learning Environment), and a server hardware that was built based on Raspberry Pi. This study also investigated different techniques to synchronize data to manage the database of the LMS asynchronously in an environment that internet is only accessible in a specific location at specific time. Thus, students in remote Northern Territory regions can store their submissions and record of their...