Management Scheme of Learning Materials on a P2P Web-Based Training System

We have proposed and implemented a distributed asynchronous Web-based training (WBT) system. In order to improve the scalability and robustness of this system, all exercises and functions, such as scores user’s answers are realized on mobile agents. These agents are distributed to computers, and they can be constructed with a P2P network that modified Content-Addressable Network (CAN). In this paper, we present the exercise management scheme for the proposed WBT system. In a WBT system based on client/server model, management of exercises is simply achieved by manipulating data, since all contents are concentrated in one server computer. In the proposed system, however, we need to pay attention to distributed agents for management of exercises. In order to achieve operation of exercise management, i.e., adding, deleting and updating exercises on the distributed WBT system, we use steps with considering multi-agent based distributed environment: specifying an agent which provides an exercise and searching its node as pre-operation, and sending an agent to the expected node and notifying other cooperating agents as post-operation. Key–Words: Distributed System, P2P, Mobile Agent, Web-based training, e-Learning