OnlineGrinds.ie launched in Ireland today. The site represents a massive leap forward in e-learning. Targeted specifically at Irish Intermediate and Leaving Certificate students, the site aims to bring the brightest and best teachers into the living rooms of all students. The idea behind the site is that students can avail of extra tuition outside of their normal school classes from these "super" teachers at a fraction of the cost that a normal one to one grind would cost, or at a fraction of the cost of the much more expensive grind schools that are available in the main cities.
The site uses live and interactive video streams, where teachers are filmed and broadcast from the OnineGrinds studios based in Dublin. Students purchase tokens on the site which they then use to attend any of the grinds available in the weekly timetable. They tune in at a specific time to get the interactive grind, where along with their fellow students they can watch and interact with the teacher via the online moderated chat room facility. As the teacher does their thing, they can take questions live, and answer individual student queries all as part of the grind. At the end of the grind there's an online test the student can take to insure they fully understand the content of the lecture. Grinds can have notes associated with them in any format, (e.g. word, pdf, powerpoint etc). Also each grind can be accessed later in the sites archive library by the students to review at their own leisure.
This state of the art website, has been developed by Sulware for Onlinegrinds and represents the very latest in online video processing technologies. "The site can theoretically handle up to 5000 concurrent users in it's current form. We can easily ramp that up if and when required.", states Sulware MD Brendan O'Sullivan. He goes on to say, "It's a very very exciting project and brings our clients right up the Internet technological edge! It represents the cumulation of over 18 months of work by our engineers."