Stages

The online learning can be organized in a couple of small steps. Some of the latter steps are only small for technical people.

• Organize communication between teacher
• Simple email exchange between pupils/students
• Using an E-Learning Managementsystem

Communication between teachers

Schools needs to organize their teacher in small groups so that they can prepare and communicate with each other. Communication includes talking and showing your computer screen to others, messages in an online forum.

Free online conferencing to talk is available in many forms. A online forum like allows to exchange messages and files and can be easily setup by technical people.

Free phone conferencing with video sharing

• Skype
• Zoom (timelimit of 40 minutes)

Free forum software

• Rocket Chat
• Flarum

There are many other solutions available.

Safe email communication

A first step towards onine learning is to organize safe email communication between pupils and their teacher. Safe means that pupils can communicate with the teacher and each other but cannot be contacted from the outside.

This can be achieved with white and blacklist on the mailserver.

Given an example mail

tim@my-school-name.example.com

and % as wildcard character matching any numbers of characters.

The whitelist ist %@my-school-name.example.com* and the blacklist is %.%

Everybody inside of a school can talk to each other, but not from the outside.

E-Learning Managementsystem Systems

The name sounds more complex as it is. It is a software which allows to organize learning online. It offers functionality to

• discuss in a forum
• discuss in a chat room (= messaging)
• create exercises and tests
• pupils can upload material

The simplest structure could be a class room containing a forum and a chat room. Here a screen shot from Ilias ELMS.

This allows the teacher to get started.

Step by step online material can be added, small exercises prepared.

E-Learning Managementsystem are available as OPEN source software, free to use. There are many options. Two which work in my opinion very good for schools are

• https://docu.ilias.de University of Cologne (Germany)
• https://chamilo.org Non profit organization (Belgium)

You can find the DOCKER setup I used for Chamilo here: https://github.com/laliluna/docker-chamilo

Ilias is better suited for larger schools where Chamilo is simpler to use.

How to setup something like this

Technical people would need about 1 day for a first setup of the given infrastructure and accounts for all students. The costs using cloud infrastructure for a school of 1000 pupils could be less than 50,- EUR per month.

Best Regards / Viele Grüße

Sebastian Hennebrueder