Abstract:

A technology that, in the near future, is likely to change our lives is the latest generation of wireless mobile communications, known as 5G. It introduces significant improvements with respect to current networking technologies in terms of a larger bandwidth, a more reliable service, very low latencies and a higher density of devices.

The questions we want to address in this paper are: can 5G be profitably applied to already existing e-learning initiatives? What didactic services, currently hard or impossible to implement, will become potentially available to e-learners?

In academic year 2004/05, the University of Milan (Italy) started offering also online an undergraduate, three-year bachelor degree on Security of Computer Systems and Networks (from here on called SSRI, its Italian acronym), activated the previous year in the traditional fashion for students participating in presence to lectures and lab activities. The main effort required to prepare the online version of SSRI has been the recording of video-lectures, constituted by slide sequences and/or desktop capturing synchronized with teacher’s voice, or blackboard-like effects recording teacher’s voice and handwriting. The duration of each video-lecture is around one fourth of the time spent by the teacher to present the same topic in classroom, optimizing the transfer of learning contents in a short time, to maximize the attention of the online student.

Even if SSRI online proved to be a very successful initiative in terms of number of enrolled students, results in exams, final graduation grades, it suffers a significant limitation: the possibility of organizing synchronous interactive sessions with a student population mainly constituted by already employed people, having difficulties in connecting through a PC during working hours. In this context, the availability of 5G technology can offer an interesting option for overcoming the above limit, allowing students to interact with teachers/tutors with full access to video materials.

The standard 5G documentation approved on mid 2018, and the first deployed trials, allow to characterize the services supplied to 5G users, and to estimate the performance achievable for applications such as two way real-time conferencing, high-quality video streaming, immersive experiences. Those applications and performance may support innovative services for e-learning such as: virtual lessons where learners can interact in real-time with the teacher with questions and remarks; experience of a realistic laboratory exercise as in presence through, e.g., virtual reality platforms.

The paper will concentrate from one side on the performances offered by 5G and from the other side on requirements for a mobile, high-quality interaction and access to video materials, to identify where 5G should be firstly adopted as soon as it will become available. In detail, we describe the infrastructure used for the implementation of the SSRI online course. We analyze the quality of experience experimented by the learners with that platform and their feedbacks. We present some numerical evaluations about the quality of service available to users with the 5G technology, and we use the achieved results to delimit the feasibility of innovative services for SSRI and the number of students who can benefit from these services, in comparison with the existing situation.

Keywords:

5G, e-learning, interactive sessions, video-lectures.