Long Distance Learning for Under-Developing Countries Using Replicated XML Database System

Abstract

Education can improve the quality and production of the people in a country in a long run, which is especially important in under developed countries. Besides, there illiteracy rates in remote districts in People Republic of China are still high. Deficient transportation and communication are common in these areas, and it is therefore necessary to resolve these two critical issues. As education involves exchanging large amount of teaching materials, such as course materials, assignments, questions and answers, between educators and learners, XML is a preferable document format for these materials and XML database is therefore a preferable storage and retrieval facility. For remote districts, it is preferable to have regional offices that handle the teaching materials, and each regional office should be equipped with an XML database and the entire education framework is supported by XML databases installed in the university, the regional offices and student machines, and the document exchanges are to be implemented by replication. This paper addresses the issues related to supporting long distance learning by resolving the communication and transportation problem with a loosely connected XML database system with replication.

The work described in this paper was substantially supported by a grant from City University of Hong Kong (Project No.: 6000156).