An Execution Control System for Application Software Reducing Administrative Burden of Educational PCs

In recent years, there have been a large number of educational PCs in many universities with the development of computer-assisted teaching. As the number of educational PCs has increased, the burden on the administrators has also increased. In general, these educational PCs have been configured from one or a few model disk images to reduce this burden. This method, however, lacks flexibility of administration. Use of some application software is restricted to specific users or specific sites in the universities. Use of other application software is prohibited by teachers during some examinations. The traditional method does not work well under these conditions. This paper proposes a system to reduce the administrative burden of educational PCs even in those situations. The proposed system controls the execution of individual application software on each educational PC depending on the attributes or the location of users. Teachers as well as administrators are allowed to configure the settings for the proposed system to control the execution of application software dynamically during their class.