Peer instruction - a summer project for Mozilla

I was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2014. My project is called “Peer instruction”, and I’m doing it under the wings of Mozilla foundation (or, more specifically, Software Carpentry).

Peer instruction

Science tells us that students in groups learn more effectively ¹. This concept is widely used in peer instruction.

Peer instruction is a teaching methodology developed over 20 years ago. It’s different from typical learning classes in today’s colleges or universities. The basic workflow goes more or less like this:

1. Teacher asks a question.
2. Students individually answer it.
3. Students are split into small groups to discuss their answers.
4. Teacher reveals the good answer.

The key feature of this methodology is splitting students into small groups.

Summer project

If you take an online classes by Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy or whoever there is, you may notice they don’t deploy peer instruction.

But with web technologies of today, it is possible to create a virtual classroom that leverages this promising teaching methodology! And my task is to do it.

The minimum outcome

No, I don’t want to create a “full-stack” virtual classroom. The minimum viable product of my work will be a proof-of-concept working web service that lets you quickly switch from broadcasting (or “teacher mode”) to many few-to-few multiplexed broadcasts (or “small-groups-talk mode”).

Of course, if I can, I’ll implement as many additional features as possible.

The obstacles

The only two difficulties I foresee right now are:

1. The lack of fast MCU technology.
2. The lack of fast internet.

MCU stands for “Multipoint Control Unit”, a software or hardware used to bridge media transmissions.

The only one open source software MCU for WebRTC (technology used for media transmission in modern browsers) I found so far is Erizo. I may have to implement an Erizo API module for Python if I decide to stick to Python.

So that’s the only issue I can somehow overcome. I cannot fix the internet speeds, though…

Possible features

If I have enough time and knowledge, I’ll implement:

• whiteboard
• voting system
• quizes
• translations

It’s going to be exciting summer. I’m looking forward to it! :)

Contributing

I welcome and highly appreciate any feedback, ideas, suggestions, or complaints. I released publicly my proposal, so you can comment it or even fork and make a better one.

I also want to share the link to the Git repository, where my work will reside. Feel free to send pull requests :)