Distributed Communication Frameworks for Peer-Assisted Digital Learning Platforms

Abstract

Digital learning environments that are peer assisted have been an important aspect of modern education since they enable mutual sharing of knowledge, peer tutoring and learners interacting with each other. Although they have gained adoption, the majority of existing platforms still use centralised communication infrastructures which often face critical issues such as limited scalability, higher latencies when there is heavy load, privacy risks due to centralised data storage, and failure due to there being a single point of vulnerability. In a bid to overcome these shortcomings, distributed communication frameworks provide a more compelling option through offering decentralised peer-to-peer communication, enhanced fault-tolerance and facilitating dynamically sharing resources amongst geographically-distributed learners. This paper suggests a scalable distributed communication architecture in peer assisted digital learning systems using distributed overlay network with efficient peer discovery, trust-based peer selection mechanisms to support reliable collaboration, adaptive routing policies to minimise the communication paths, and edge-based coordination as a way to minimise network congestion and maximise real time responsiveness of networks. The architecture proposed is capable of supporting a large number of learners and at the same time has a low communication overhead and also ensures that the quality of service is constant to the interactive educational sessions. When performance is measured in the environments of different network sizes, it has been found that the distributed approach is quite effective in terms of reducing communication latency, enhancing throughput and the reliability of the sessions as compared to traditional centralised learning management systems. Also, integration of reputation-based trust models enhances the security of the platform by ensuring bad or bad faith peer behaviour is lessened, thus enhancing the learning process. The findings prove that distributed and spatially-helping communication frameworks can be used as effective design foundations of peer-powered digital learning platforms of the next generation, which are well-scalable, resilient and privacy-compliant collaborations. The contribution of this work towards the creation of decentralised educational systems that can facilitate real-time peer interactions and scalable learning communication across the globe is possible.