The Distributed Education Center (DEC) was a unit in AIT to take the lead in E-learning for the institute where it provided technical and training support for faculty members who would like to use E-learning. It has provided support to many faculty individually as well as to the School of Management GTZ project with the support from RTG, the unit developed its own open source Learning Management System and E-learning platform which later became known as VClass with many universities have become VClass members, where priority was given to Thai universities, initially. The under platform has enabled them to experiment with E-learning without risking heavy investment. The unit has become part of intERLab as of 2004 and ceased to operate as DEC in 2005.
IMPACTS
* VClass has been further developed to include mobility management and real-time multimedia functionalities as part of intERLab’s research in SIP and E-learning. Its outcome has been used in our distance education project called ANGKOR supported by the ICT-ASIA grant under the French government. After the project which Vclass was used for interactive discussion between France and Cambodia, now since 2008 VClass has been adopted for medical education by the French Virtual University in Africa and CanalAVIST.
Trial runs is being planned for with the Thai Cyber University and the Thai University Network.
* intERLab/AIT is now the center for ASEAN Virtual Institute of Science and Technology (AVIST) under the Committee for Science and Technology of ASEAN where most of the courseware on AVIST were developed by our team at intERLab.
* AVIST’s new project includes real-time seminar and research updates over high speed research and education network covering ASEAN countries called the Trans-Eurasia Information Network (TEIN) network. intERLab is spearheading this project and provide technical co-ordination for all members to run regular broadcast over TEIN3.
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