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Ask HN: Minimal-bandwidth conferencing for remote education on poor countries

5 points by Frauber84 ↗ HN
In Brazil (and probably elsewhere) we are facing serious issues with remote education. Many students rely on 3G/4G connections with data limits and teachers are having a hard time delivering content.

For video lessons, I have been using ffmpeg to segment and compress lessons with -stillimage and the lowest bitrates possible to distribute via WhatsApp, as some ISPs don't charge for data on this popular platform.

However, me and my peers have not been able to find a solution for minimal-bandwidth conferencing, sharing only audio and still image content (slide lessons) and running on cheap Android phones and tablets. Do you know such tool/plataform, have any suggestions for alternatives or open source projects that could be easily adapted for this purpose, or can actually build a minimal solution that is suitable for this? If so, you could be really help people in poor countries.

It saddens me so much that people are being left out, poverty is on the rise and education is just being neglected. Hope I can get some good use of the intelligence pool here!

9 comments

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tsegratis
Fully offline is great, because students get the full experience, and access it repeatedly without cost -- so lots of pre-downloaded material. Downloaded HTML and still images, or pdfs are great for mobile phone viewing

Then chat apps such as email or messaging systems are especially great, because when the network drops, nothing is lost and the conversation can resume later

I would suggest teachers do this, possibly with telegram channels or similar. That way the class can have a group to participate in and share problems. Could this be the kind of confrencing you're after. It is as low bandwidth as it gets, resilient against network failure, and allows real time chat in a group...

Often more directivity is wanted though.... One option might be teachers recording audio-visual videos (their voice + preferably blank background slideshow as the visual). Which I think you're already doing

Another option is voip. Which is already heavily optimized for low bandwidth. Something like [1] or the team chat options computer gamers use. Onething to consider is if it is possible to record the audio session for later download -- since it is frustrating for students who can't get in reception range or if the audio drops out -- but a download might let them catch what they missed. If that would be useful to you, I don't know. But I suggest browsing the voip options, since there are many

I'm a programmer. But none of my suggestions involve programming, or creating new apps. There are good reasons for this. 1) It is a lot of work. 2) Students would need to download and learn them. 3) Existing apps they know fix some of these problems really well

One final suggestion. Try zoom, with video disabled, and the shared screen view for teacher to draw on. If this doesn't work for you, then probably no custom app is going to either

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software)

tsegratis
Also, have you seen digital storytelling? -- Basically powerpoint + voiceover as a way to share messages. Low bandwidth, realatively easy for teachers to create, and a good medium for communication

Also, this just came up [1], and they talk about its use in teaching, though I dont know if it gives you anything beyond the apps students already have?

[1] https://blog.zulip.com/2020/07/16/zulip-3-0-released/

Frauber84
Yes, digital storytelling is what I have been mostly doing, with ffmpeg for extreme compression, coupled with some quizzes and small tasks.

I'm familiar with Slack so I'll check out Zulip, it looks great!

Frauber84
Those are all good ideas, I am mostly going the fully offline route, however some teachers lack time (too many classes), experience or equipments to produce good content.

VoIP is new to me, I will look at that. I also found that Microsoft Teams has policy settings to limit bitrates for specific users, so that might be also an option to limit bandwidth for students with data limits (between 3-6Gb/month in basic plans around here).

tsegratis
Maybe record the teachers as they teach; as a way to produce content?

There may even be a good-enough auto voice->text transcriber for Portuguese?

A double bonus would be having the teachers review the recording/transcribing -- as some teachers (if not all of us), improve after checking recordings of what we do

Blessings on your efforts

--

I was sitting beside a very impressive Ecuadorean teacher today, with refugees

Sometimes larger change is need for society. Something like having older children teach younger children has been effective in recent history

My most effective technique to-date, has been to pray

tsegratis
Also good luck, and well done :) nice work you're upto
remotelyyours
Hey! It saddens me too that education quality is suffering because of this.

I am working on a tool to solve the exact problem you have. It's called vlokit [0]. It's an async video chat platform. You can easily upload video, screenshare, audio. It's almost instant. Your kids can go through the content and reply back with audio/video/screenshare within the same thread.

We have seen educators in Asia use our platform to conduct complete classes on vlokit. Kids access our platforms on cheap android phones. It's great because we're have mobile-friendly website and the content works amazingly well on low-bandwidth connections as well.

Let me know if you need help setting this up. I think it'll be incredibly useful for you.

[0] https://vlokit.com

remotelyyours
Frauber84, do you still need help with this? I really want to help you get this going. Do let me know.