Subsequent to his resignation from BRAC University, Prof. Islam has founded SoftEd and is continuing his previous work in distance education via the Bangladesh Virtual Classroom project.
This project is being conducted in association with the Bangladesh Open University, with funding from SPIDER.

• The first pilot (also funded by SPIDER) consisted of 2 video lessons, that were presented to students using computers.
• The current project is aiming to build on that and record 26 lessons to be broadcast at a later date (5 sites with 60-90 students each). Lessons will not be presented live to students but will have a live feeling to them as they will show students and teachers interacting.

Overall objectives of the project: (from http://www.electronicgovernment.se/bvc/)
The objective of the project is to make the interactive pedagogy tested during the “Bangladesh Virtual Classroom” project sustainable at Bangladesh Open
University.

Project deliverables are:
• The “Virtual classroom” as an established method of working at BOU, and as a universal transferable method. This includes interactive pedagogy as well as methods for production of interactive courses and for delivering these in an economically and technically viable fashion.
• Validated test results from large scale tests (estimated 30 000 students).

Project code repository:
http://code.google.com/p/bvc-softed/

It is Prof. Islam's opinion that SPIDER's interest stems in part from wishing to explore the possibility of deploying such a solution in Africa.