CanalAVIST

In ASEAN countries, there is a wide diversity of availability of talks from experts and luminary speakers. From every other day in more developed countries, to once a blue moon in some remote universities in developing countries, the disparity amongst haves and have-nots is great enough to warrant an e-solution. CanaAVIST aims to provide channels for seamless education, teaching, training, conferencing, lectures, talks throughout ASEAN countries for ASEAN researchers and students.

What's on?

To provide rapid dissemination and sustainable sharing of knowledge, information, data and skills in the context of ASEAN countries for

Life Long e-Learning

All S&T personnel who should be engaged in life-long learning need more regular events such as talks, seminars, tea club discussions, meetings, conferences, workshops, symposia, training courses etc. While air travel is becoming cheaper, resources and time are limited, and if we can bring training events to the individual's workplace by electronic means, life-long learning as a habit can take root far more easily. Moreover, from the point of view of life-long learning, students or participants must constantly engage themselves with the latest developments as a matter of habit and with high regularity. This is crucial particularly in rapidly advancing areas in Science and Technology, such as in environmental research, life sciences, earth monitoring and sensing, nanotechnology and so on. If not, their training will become obsolete immediately after their online lessons are over.

Channels of Events

At the moment, many prominent scientists in ASEAN and visiting ASEAN institutions give talks and lectures throughout the year in ad hoc meetings and symposia or in scheduled conferences. Such talks and lectures are currently localised within the institution and limited number of people can enjoy the interaction. By creating multiple channels of communications via the ASEAN science and technology network infrastructure already present, and to increase the intellectual level of the sharing and communication, they can have a wider ASEAN audience through e-conferencing technologies. In addition, recorded talks and lectures can be archived and reassembled for online education, or repackaged as course material. Cumulative Repository of Recorded Learning Materials At present, the ASEAN Virtual Institute of Science and Technology (AVIST) conducts several courses online regularly. However, this is limited by the number of courses and the amount of lectures it can acquire. If lectures can be donated to AVIST, a repository can be built up which can be re-used or re-purposed for a wider combination of courses, or translated and dubbed in local languages or subtitled. This will be a very useful resource for S&T educators and trainers to make use of these donated, open access materials with proper accreditation, copyleft, or Creative Commons.

How?

CanalAVIST will rely on existing country research and education network facility to deliver lectures over TEIN2+APAN to respective member countries. With TEIN2 and APAN, we can deliver real-time lectures from the US via Internet*2 and Europe via GEANT2 to ASEAN member countries.

Hence CanalAVIST' main function is to co-ordinate the lecture series and organizing events by
  1. creating multiple nodes of video conferencing capability throughout ASEAN
  2. narrow-casting or multicasting in real-time lectures, talks, etc to multiple receiving nodes throughout ASEAN or in quasi-real time, or for re-broadcasting at regular intervals
  3. archiving such talks and training material and repackaging them into learning material for asynchronous viewing by P2P BitTorrent-type of data dissemination in low bandwidth endusers or offline learning by CDROMs.
  4. creating a rich repository of annotated and curated training material for educators to use, re-use, re-purpose, synthesize, translate, subtitle, annotate etc. for their local educational purpose


Underlying infrastructure and technologies:

CanalAVIST will utilize the advanced research and education network infrastructure under Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) and the TransEurasia Information Network (TEIN2) . Streaming VDO to be used will range from H.263 to DVTS supported by an E-learning platform VCLASS (see http://www.vclass.net) by the Internet Education and Research Lab, Asian Institute of Technology. This would allowshigh quality low cost video conference and telecommunications over advanced computer networks such as ASTRENA (Peering of NRENS) -TEIN2-APAN. The Data Dissemination Technology to be used was developed by the Prince of Songhkla University (PSU) and the National University of Singapore are completing an IDRC-funded project to build a network of P2P data dissemination nodes throughout ASEAN with partners in Korea from KOBIC. The system is now made available for all to make copies of large datasets (see http://everest.bic.nus.edu.sg/p2p/) for content storage and content dissemination. 		 
 
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