About a week after initial announcement of my hobby project – OpenClass, I am pleased to announce that the project instead of fading to limbo managed to mature a lot in this time. And now with all its features and enhancement, I felt that it got ready for version 0.1.
For those of you who haven’t got a chance to look at it yet – OpenClass is an open-source class control solution which I develop in my free time, which helps teacher to control his activities in the classroom. Among such activities, the ones most notable ones are:
(From teacher to student)
- screen projection (send content of teacher screen to all the students)
- full-screen resolution-independent screen projection
- student attention request (blocking student activities and asking them to look at teacher)
- viewing contents of all students screens at once
- direct messaging to students
- file sharing and URL sharing to enrich class activities
- shutting down student computers from teacher
- allow and reject students from a specific class
- allow to block students from attempting to connect to a class
- support for multi-seat configurations and multiple clients per machine (for example, xdmcp-based environments)
(From student to teacher)
- automatic teacher discovery via broadcast
- receiving of teacher screen projection via multicasting protocol, suitable for both wired and wireless environments
- “raise hand” functionality to call teacher attention
- possibility to select teacher to connect to
- automatic handling of network saturation and disconnection events
And, of course, the best part. This application is open-source, and distributed under the GPLv2 license.
Of course, one could wonder – why should we need another class control solution, specially if we have ITALC?
Well, as most things in Linux and open-source world… just for fun!
But speaking seriously, I’ve been working on developing a closed-source multi-platform class control application called Bluelab at mstech from 2005 to 2008, until I left the company. However, most of this time since then, I felt that while there are many powerful, big, premium, advanced and full-featured classroom control solutions, some things were still missing in all of them..
So I decided to write one new solution, which would look like I think it should. Small. Efficient. Fast. Open-sourced. And real.
For this, I took some hours of my free time for some of the past weeks, and wrote it entirely from scratch, based on some lose ideas I had for the past years.
So, if you are interested – please, feel free to access the project page, look at the screenshots, grab the code from github, or grab the mandriva 2011-ready packages directly.
And – of course – if you have ideas, comments, suggestions, critics and contributions, please, say 
.
