OpenClass is a simple open-source solution for class control, designed with the following features in mind:

  • small footprint
  • light-weight functionality
  • minimum of non-essential features

If you already know how italc, bluelab, mythware, iClass and similar solutions work, you already know what OpenClass is. If you do not, here is some
introduction.

Introduction

OpenClass is a small class control solution, which helps teacher to control his activities in the classroom. Among such activities, the most commonly used are:

(From teacher to student)

  • screen projection (send content of teacher screen to all the students) in different resolutions and bandwidth usage modes
  • 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
  • viewing individual student screens in full resolution
  • direct messaging to students
  • share a student screen with other 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

(Misc)

  • support for Linux and Windows-based operating systems
  • possibility to have multiple teachers and classes on same network/vlan
  • multicast throttling to avoid saturating the network

And, of course, the best part. This application is open-source, and distributed under the GPLv2 license.

Why another class control solution?

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, please welcome OpenClass, a small, efficient, cross-platform class control solutoin.

Have fun and enjoy it :) .

P.S.: One final but important consideration. This is NOT “iTalc from Mandriva”. This project is not endorsed by Mandriva, I did it in my own time for fun. Just because I happen to work at Mandriva at this time does not means that I cannot do any other open-source projects in my free time for my own :) .