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The Libre Services model has an important application in the context of learning environments.
Schools (primary, high school, colleges and universities) have a particular set of computing and communications requirements. As well as the usual productivity tools, students, faculty and staff in a school environment also need specialized services for posting class schedules and class notes, turning in homework, automated grading, posting grades, etc.
Thus far the provision of these services has largely been based on the traditional hardware/software model, consisting of multiple PCs running proprietary software. Typically each student, teacher or classroom is provided with his/her/its own fully equipped desktop client PC.
This traditional model results in very high cost of ownership for both hardware and software.
The high cost of hardware ownership can be addressed by the ultra-thin client model. In this model the fully equipped desktop PC is replaced by a very simple I/O station running only a remote client application. The I/O station consists of little more than a display, keyboard and mouse, plus sufficient computing power required to run the remote client. The client application connects to a host application running on a server PC, which runs all the computing and communications services.
This ultra-thin client model greatly reduces the hardware costs for large-scale distributed computing.
Adoption of this centralized computing model has been held up by the lack of a suitable software environment to deliver the necessary services. The Libre Services model is ideally suited to satisfy this need.
We call the development of a specialized Libre Service for the school environment as Libre School, or Operation WhiteBoard. This model consists of the combination of the ultra-thin client hardware model, together with the Libre Services software model, thereby greatly reducing both hardware and software costs of ownership.
As a first step in this project we propose the definition of an additional abstract entity to represent the generalized abstraction of a student. This will be an extension of the abstraction of an individual person, with specialized attributes to cater to the specific needs of students.
This is a low-priority project.
A schedule for this project has not yet been established.
We are currently seeking sponsorship for this project.
A project manager has not yet been assigned.
No work has been done on this project yet.