Building an e-learning platform by access grid and data grid technologies

Due to overall popularity of the Internet, e-learning has become a hot method of learning in recent years. Through the Internet, learners can freely absorb new knowledge without the restriction of time and place. Many companies have adopted e-learning to train their employees. The e-learning system can make an enterprise more competitive by increasing the knowledge of its employees. As we know, e-learning has become one of the most potential e-commerce businesses. At present, most e-learning environment architectures are in consideration of a single computer or server as its erecting foundation. As soon as its workload increases, the software and hardware need to be updated or renewed; this is a big burden to a company with insufficient budget. Thus, in this research we employ a kind of grid computing technology, called "access grid", to integrate the idle computer resources in an enterprise into an e-learning platform for substituting the purchase of costly high-level server and equipment. The access grid supports group-to-group communication via high-speed networking over the Internet. It provides high quality audio and real-time video interactive interface for e-learning users. All the hardware cost is reasonable so that companies or academies can easily set up their own access grid node. By using access grid technologies, enterprises can integrate their training materials into knowledge repository such as "data grid" as the e-learning VOD platform so that the knowledge can be shared and published more flexibly and widely.