Education is of uppermost importance for the future of our young people.

To support them, gcs offers solutions for training and education in two different areas:

Remote Teaching and Tele Presence

An audio and video stream of a teacher or presenter is delivered over a broadcast network or the Internet towards the users. In addition to this stream, presentation slides are transferred separately and can be displayed on the client together with text comments. Of course, all these streams are synchronized to provide the same experience as on-site.

If a return link is available, interactive text-chats with the presenter are possible too.

We already successfully deployed such solutions for satellite-based distance learning applications.

Internet Access

Internet access is often a problem for schools in rural areas. Even though access to the Internet is nowadays possible in almost all parts of the world, broadband access is often too expensive or not-possible at all.

For these scenarios we developed the SchoolCast system as part of an ESA project together with ATIT, WebSat, Intel and HEANet.

SchoolCast allows to select any set of web-sites which will be periodically mirrored and distributed via a broadcast network towards the clients (schools). A client, acting as HTTP and FTP proxy for a school, answers requests for these sites using the local copy. Other web sites are retrieved as usual using the existing (narrow-band) Internet connection of the school.

The system can lead to tremendous bandwidth savings. For example, a teacher can select the web sites which he wants to use during the next lesson via the SchoolCast web frontend and the system will ensure that there is a local copy available during the next lesson. Thus, even media-rich web sites can be used by all pupils in parallel.

SchoolCast was used during the project to provide large web sites to schools in the north of Ireland.