The general problems to be addressed by the Electronic Classroom program are the following:

A. to provide a simple way for instructors to convey lecture material electronically to students
B. to provide an easy interface for students with which to access and interact with that material
C. to provide a method by which users of the Electronic Classroom can communicate with each other

While there are commercial and freely available applications which can solve these general problems, the Electronic Classroom will improve upon functions to those made available by these programs. Specifically, the following problems will be addressed:

A. providing access to students both inside and outside of the classroom
B. attendance taking

This application is created to address the needs of a specific customer. This customer requires tools and functions in an application not currently available in any other solution. This application will combine the necessities not available in any other single program.

In addition, in the development of the Electronic Classroom program, the following problems are not addressed in other commercially-available tools and will be in the Electronic Class solution:

A. to show slide shows with drawing overlays
B. to allow creation of slide shows using XML, as opposed to a restrictive file format
C. to provide fully documented, public domain source code for use by others
D. to control opacity on the notes layer on slides