Using Kolibri RPi 4 across multiple classrooms

Hi @RadinaMatic

Thanks for your reply and the useful suggestions. Our testing has been going quite well.

For a number of years we have been using low cost wifi router hardware running an OpenWrt firmware build to provide simple classroom based digital library devices to share static content from SD / USB memory devices. Typical devices are GLiNet AR300M, AR750M and MT300NV2. These devices cost around $25-40 each and will support 30+ students accessing the library material concurrently. They are simple and robust and have proved reliable in use. By using a low power wifi router within each classroom, every student gets a reliable, high speed connection without creating wifi and network congestion.

We are now using the same devices as front ends for the Kolibri RPi devices we are testing. As expected, they work well in that role as well.

In addition, we have now added a cache facility into the classroom wifi device to store content from the upstream Kolibri device.

What this means is that when one student in a classroom requests a particular piece of content from Kolibri, it will be stored on the classroom device, so that when more students request the same content, it will be served directly from the classroom device with no significant interaction with the upstream Kolibri device.

As you will appreciate, this dramatically reduces the workload on the Kolibri device and the connecting network. Our testing is showing that we can connect large numbers of students in typical classroom scenarios without creating a significant load on the Kolibri device. This will allow us to reduce the cost and administrative overhead of operating many Kolibri devices across each school.

We have also found that it is essential for the content files to be optimised for web use. We have found that video files in some channels are not correctly optimised and this can affect the performance of the system since the whole file has to be transferred before the video can start playing. There is a separate post on this subject here:
Optimisation of mp4 videos

Anyway, we are continuing to develop this approach and we plan to deploy it to a number of field sites over the coming months.