Design and development of collaborative educational network — Global virtual institution using grid, federated identity management and virtual meeting techonologies

In traditional educational system opportunity for collaborative and cooperative learning is majorly confined to the group of tutors and/or learners in the same campus. Online education provides greater flexibility and opportunity to enhance the knowledge and skills at individual level. However if these tools are augmented with real time discussion on subject matter through live interaction among students and between students and tutors, access to distributed resources under different administrative domains with an appropriate trusted policy in place, maintenance of content repositories having text, multimedia lectures etc., adoption of technology based education will be appreciated by the stakeholders especially by tutors and learners. Collaborative Class Room (CCR) is an initiative from Centre for Development of Advanced Computing to create a distributed online virtual environment providing effective eLearning mode of training leveraging on computational and storage grid (GARUDA) and high speed network National Knowledge Network (NKN). Collaborative Class Room also has capability to form online educational network among academic and research institutes thus provides a way to form learning federations. This paper describes about Collaborative Class Room concept, architecture and implementation in detail.