Vuyisa Baza

Building  a peer to peer learning platform with WebRTC

Supervisor: Nomusa Dlodlo

Pursuing a university degree can be a challenging prospect. The approach to learning changes, with the interaction between students and teachers declining. It comes as no surprise that most first year students tend to struggle at university level. This is especially true for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. These students tend to come from schools that fail to equip them with the necessary skills required to master basic concepts taught in university. 

These students usually have little to no experience of using computers which significantly hampers their chances of graduation. This results in some students not engaging with the learning materials or participating in course-related activities. Although the tools for assisting these students already exist, they limit students in what they can contribute and benefit from the learning process and do little to aid collaboration among students. 

Effectively, using Mobile technologies and Web Realtime Communication (WeRTC) could increase student engagement in course-related content and increase collaboration between students and instructors. This is a possibility in a context in which most people have access to mobile phones. 

This research aims to build a mobile application that leverages WebRTC real-time communication capabilities using the Socket.io API for message signalling to help increase collaboration among students and increase student participation in the learning process. The research follows the Design Science Research (DSR) approach.