Question

Virtual Study Group App

Description:

Virtual study group app is where Students can meet up on a common forum and prepare for their exams with other students who are studying the same subject. The app can provide them with study material, tools, discussion helps, guides and flash cards.

I need:

1- usecase diagram for Virtual Study Group App ?

2-functionnel and non functionnel requirements ?

Answer 1

Requirements of a Virtual Classroom

A viable virtual classroom should provide its users with a real life like learning environment to achieve its objectives. Such a system should have a number of functional and non-functional requirements. The functional requirements of such a system are described in Section 3.1. Section 3.2 focuses on the non-functional specifications.

3. 1 Functional Requirements

The main functional objectives of the virtual classroom are to create and offer courses, enrol students in offered courses, provide a platform to present and discuss materials related to a particular course, store course materials online such that they are easily accessible, and providing the tools necessary for student evaluation and feedback. The major functional requirements for the Virtual Classroom system are discussed in the following paragraphs. The most basic of functionalities of a virtual classroom is to maintain an identity of a user. This involves adding a new profile and modifying it later. The profile may also be archived if the user becomes dormant however, from a security point of view, deleting a user profile should not be allowed. Creating and modifying an existing profile should be allowed by all users however, archiving it should only be allowed for the administrator. The users’ profiles may be of students or instructors. The second important functionality of a virtual classroom should be to manage courses that will be taught by the instructors.

Similar to a user profile, each course will also have a profile which can be changed or archived. A course can be in open (students can register), closed (registration is closed but the course is being conducted), and archived (course is not being conducted currently). A searchable directory of all courses and their corresponding details should also be maintained. Students are allowed to add a course to their portfolio while it is still open. Once the course is closed for registration, students are only allowed to drop it before a date specified by the instructor. Each course will be linked to the students’ profiles who are registered in that course. The instructor should be able to view certain parts of the students’ profiles in accordance with the organizational policy. The virtual classroom should provide the users with a storage space for each course. Instructors can upload course material while the students can upload their completed assignments.

Most major virtual classroom systems do not include audio and video conferencing facilities. Most of the interactions is via text (email, notice boards, black boards, documents, etc.). The current extent of video or audio interaction is the student or instructor uploading a video of him/her which can be viewed offline. However, the element of back and forth natural conversation is missing. Some virtual classroom tools use third party tools to support video conferencing. We propose that every comprehensive virtual classroom should have a audio/video conferencing component. Such a component should allow the users to setup and initiate a conference. Users should be able to invite other users to join in. The user who initiated the conference, any person who has been given permission by the initiator, and the administrator, should have to authority to stop or modify the conference. Users may be allowed to join the conference as an active participant (participants are allowed to interrupt), as a passive participant (participants are not allowed to interrupt), and a hidden/silent participant (instructor only). Users should also be allowed to leave the conference whenever they desire. The conference initiator should also be able to allocate time slots to each speaker during the conference and himself act as a moderator.

Another important component of any virtual classroom environment is related to grading, tests, and assignments. This playing a crucial role in allowing the instructor to keep track of the students’ progress. He/she may set up online or take-home tests and assignments. The assignments and take home tests should be uploaded to a secure folder only accessible by the instructor and the student who is the owner of the files. The student should be allowed to complete any online tests and assignment. The grading may be manual (in case of essay questions) or automatic (such as in case of multiple choice, tru/false, matching, short answer questions). The system should keep track of all student activity related to tests and assignments for record purposes.

3.2 Non-Functional Requirements

Many virtual classroom systems have been developed and are available in the market such as Moodle5 and Desire2Learn6 . We, however, also focus on the non-functional requirements of such a system. These requirements are important for the system to be able to provide educational services in a manner that the users are not discouraged and continue to learn in the virtual environment. As previously mentioned, the objective of a virtual learning environment is to reach individuals who do not have the capacity to attend a real life classroom. To achieve this, many nonfunctional requirements have to be catered for.

A non-Functional requirement is a requirement that judges the operation of a system. They are not functional requirements but together with functional requirements they become the core requirements of a system. Moreover, these non-functional requirements affect the manner how the software is designed and implemented. There can be many non-functional requirements of the Virtual Classroom. However, the main concerns are reliability and security (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) of the service provided by the system and the data stored in the system. The virtual classroom system should also be highly portable and conform to a minimum level of performance especially while uploading/downloading materials and audio/video conferencing.

Reliability is the property of a system that dictates that it should remain in operation under unfavourable situations. If the service in not available when it is needed the most, then the purpose of the service fails. A reliable system would include mechanisms (e.g., fault tolerance) to ensure continuity of service. Another important requirement for such a system will be security. A security requirement has been defined as a control, safeguard, or countermeasure to avoid or remove vulnerabilities that may be exploited to violate the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data. These constraints have to be made part of the development during all its phases7, 8, 9, 10, 11. The classroom materials should be preserved in a manner such that unauthorized people cannot make changes (integrity). Materials should also be available when it is required.

Performance is another important requirement for the virtual classroom. In the following subsection, we discuss some of the important reliability, security, and performance requirements.

3.2.1 Reliability Requirements

* If a user is disconnected during an audio/video conference (without the user explicitly logging out), then the connection will be restored as soon as possible without asking for his/her credentials. If, however, the connection cannot be re-established, then the time when the user was disconnected for future reference, the current state of the user’s work will be saved, and the user will be logged off.

* If the connection between the user and the system is broken prior, the system shall enable the user to save the current state and continue from that state once the connection is restored.

* The system should backup user data at regular intervals to avoid loss.

*The system shall attempt to restore a lost session due to communication interruption to the point where it was broken.

3.2.2 Security Requirements

* All users should be authenticated before granting access to the Virtual Classroom.

* All users should have access according to their respective authorization privileges.

* Student should be enrolled in a course before accessing its materials and attempting its assignments and Tests. *The instructor is only allowed to mark those students absent/present who are absent/present in the virtual classroom. A student can be marked inactive if he/she is present but does not respond to the instructor or has not performed an action for a certain amount of time.

* Assignments should be uploaded before being graded.

* Test should have been attempted before being graded.

* The instructor can only initiate a class that has been scheduled at least 24 hours in advance.

*All internet communications that involve any personal information should be encrypted.

* Instructors should only be able to access their records of students who are currently registered in their course. These records should be limited to the course that is being taught by the instructor.

3.2.3 Portability Requirements

*The design of the Virtual Classroom system should allow the application to run on all widely used browsers.

*The design of the Virtual Classroom system should cater for different screen sizes (desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphones) and input mediums (touch screen vs keyboards and mice).

*The design of the Virtual Classroom system should be able to run on different operating systems.

3.2.4 Performance Requirements

*The system should be able to accommodate at least 50 users (approximate strength of a class) simultaneously in the video conferencing mode. This requirement will ensure that at least one class can proceed during any time slot. This requirement can be strengthened when more resources are added to the system.

* All Web pages generated by the system shall be fully downloadable in no more than 10 seconds over a 40 Kbps modem connection.

*While in the chat mode, the responses should not take more than 5 seconds to appear on the chat screen.

4. Conclusion The purpose of this project is to provide a platform that is most helpful in gaining education online anytime and anywhere. Virtual Classroom is a complete gateway to education; this project offers classrooms for different subjects. Students would enrol themselves into the course they desire by filling in the formalities online. The schedule of every class would be notified to the students enrolled. A database is maintained to manage attendance and student records. This project could be used by anyone who seeks education thus it refers to a general audience. This project would not only increase the rate of literacy but would introduce an entirely new approach that would be feasible in many ways for different people. The Virtual Classroom has been deployed and is currently being used. Initial indicators show that the reliability and performance of the application are within acceptable parameters. Moreover, penetrations testing has not revealed any of the known vulnerabilities that may exist in such systems. Studies show that a major portion of the population feels comfortable learning in this virtual environment, thus increasing their ability to learn. This project also focuses nonfunctional requirements of reliability, security, and performance. These non-functional requirements are a necessary part of any application. We, in this paper, propose several non-functional requirements that aim to improve reliability, security, and performance of any virtual learning system.

Hope that answers the Question.thank you