layout: blog title: "SciSchool.in" description: "Science Education and Scientific Temper" follow: true smooth-scroll: true math : true --- Objective of this site is to build a collection of resources for promoting science education and scientific temper. That could be done on some free hosting services, and it was scheduled to start after several months. Establishing it in the current form is due to other reasons. The Covid-19 pandemic has turned the attention of everyone to the tools available for online classes. However, most of them are interested in availing the free services from software multinational companies. No institution seems to be bothered about establishing a long term solution that it fully owns and controls. Free and Open Source Software provides some valuable soltions for this. This site is a model implementation os the essential software tools required for an educational organization to operate in the present scenario and even after that. All the software used is completly Free and Open Source, including the operating system. I assume that any educational institute should have a 1. Web Server 3. Learning Management System, for creating and managing courses. 2. Video conferencing server, for online classes All these services are implemented on the same server under several subdomains. The following pararaphs explain the hardware and software implementation details so that anybody interested can build similar systems. ### The Computer The minimum hardware requirement is a Pentium i3 quad core with 8GB RAM or something equivalent. It should have an Internet connection with 1Gbps speed and a static IP address. There are two ways to implement this. - A physical machine at your location with the above stated specifications. - Rent a virtual machine from some of the cloud services, like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, etc. One can hire a virtual machine on one of the Cloud services like Amazon AWS or Digital Ocean. On Digital Ocean, a virtual machine running Ubuntu on a quad core CPU with 8GB RAM and 160GB disk space costs US$ 40/- A static IP address and 5TB of data transfer per month is included. per month. I have selected this option, but there are better schemes costing more. You need a valid credit card to open an account. It takes only several minutes to hire and configue a virtual machine. In both cases your need to register a domain name, 'scischool.in' in our case. The procedure to register a name is the same for real and virtual ones on the cloud. like the DO Droplet. There are many domain name offering companies like 'godaddy' on the Internet. I got it from Zyxware domains, Trivandrum. It costs around Rs 700/- per year to maintain a domain name with **.in** extension. You may find discount deals for the first year. The domain registrar provides an online account where you can point your registered domain name to your IP address. A new entry takes several hours to propagate to all the DNS servers on the Internet, that's how the DNS system works. ### The Software Packages We are using the GNU/Linux operating system Ubuntu, and the required Free Sftware packages are available on it. We only need to choose from a wide variety of things available. - **The Web Server** I have chosen a static website rather than a Content Management System like Drupal. A CMS require more care and maintenance to avoid cyber attacks. A static website is almost immune to attacks. I have been running a [website](https://expeyes.in/) under Drupal and after several attacks, decided to make it static. Nowadays, you don't have to learn and write HTML to build a site. Use a system like [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) anybody with some computer experience can create a website. I wrote ExpEYES site in HTML but later on witnessed somebody making a [better website](https://csparkresearch.in/) using Jekyll within a couple of days. I just took a stripped down template of it to create this site. There are dozens of such [templates](http://jekyllthemes.org/) vailable on Jekyll website. There many [popular websites](https://jekyllrb.com/showcase/) made using Jekyll. The language used is called [Markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/) and the what I typed to make this page is [HERE](index.md.txt). - **The Learning Management System** Fortunately, the most popular LMS is today is Moodle, that is open source. This site currently hosts a couple of Moodle sites. The [Moodle Site](https://lms.scischool.in/) will become a repository of several courses. The [Second Moodle Site](https://alpha.scischool.in/) currently contains only the courses created by a group of teachers who are learning Moodle. There is some plan to organize some Moodle Training Sessions. Interested teachers may [Register Here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1cRdKnDuEvGSFkCSsgVCJpA1n5s58pwzuWSzfnG5WzlM/edit?usp=sharing) - **Videoconferencing Server** [Bigbluebutton Server](https://bbb.scischool.in/b) is an open source videoconferencing software. The server installed on this server has been tested by conducting online classes with more than 50 participants. I can provide the available information and some help to any educational institution interested in setting up server like this. Of course you can find them on the Internet. Ajith Kumar B P bpajith at gmail dot com