What is AVAPolos?
AVAPolos is an Information Technology solution that enables educational institutions to offer 'online' courses in places with no Internet connection or poor Internet connection.
The institution that will offer the courses installs the AVAPolos solution on a server and populates the virtual learning environment with courses, instructors and students. When the environment is ready, the institution performs the AVAPolos cloning operation to a new server.
The cloned server is taken to the offline site where students will access the e-learning environment through a local network (intranet), and will be able to study, to do the assignments and to messages to the instructors. At certain point course materials, assignments, and messages will be synchronized between servers, enabling communication between students and instructors, the delivery of grades, and new courses to be sent from the educational institution to the offline site.
Data is synchronized through the creation of an AVAPolos data package (exportation process) on a server, and subsequently the data package importation in the other server (importation process). In this way, the data package can be transported on a removable disk between the educational institution and the offline site.
This process enables sending and receiving new courses, course contents, assignments, and the communication among intructors and students, in the same way these things happen currently in online courses.
The Virtual Learning Environment provided by AVAPolos comes with a package of IT educational services for offline sites, including:
- Moodle: Adapted version of the platform that enables the creation and management of online courses, but without Internet..
- eduCAPES Portal: A repository of more than 120GB with Open Educational Resources (OER) in Portuguese, accessible to students through the local network. The repository is provided and maintained by CAPES .
- MediaWiki: A service that allow students to create a local, offline, collaborative Wiki..
We hope to integrate new services to AVAPolos. Its architecture was designed to easily add new services.
THE ROAD TILL HERE
AVAPolos - Taking distance education where the Internet cannot reach
26 nov 2019
As it is an event related to distance education, it was very important to be present. At CAPES invitation, the solution was presented during the event along with other projects, gaining a prominent place in the event. In addition, in the publications sections and article was presented by the project team, which reported the development and general use of the solution.