Workshop on Distance Learning

Sponsors: IEEE Computer Society and the Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) at West Virginia University
Host: Center for Design Research at Stanford University
WET ICE '96 Organizer: CERC at West Virginia University

It may be widely advertised that the technology for implementing interactive multimedia and other promising applications of the Internet and the World Wide Wed is currently available but the reality is that it is not. Several technical difficulties are still hindering the progress towards a scalable, affordable, manageable, developer friendly, and user friendly systems.

A number of the technical and policy issues which need to be addressed and solved before we can have multimedia applications which take advantage of the Internet. We currently have the resources to enable and manage, to a very limited way, groups to have multimedia communication and collaboration. Scaling these groups to hundred of students will necessitate management tools for handling the various multimedia streams, allocating bandwidth to them; it will require new protocols for controlling these streams, new protocols for student, teacher interactions. Perhaps even more importantly we need to improve the performance of existing collaboration and conferencing tools by an order of magnitude by such techniques as reliable multicasting for data traffic and efficient utilization of the underlying network. A whole new set of unresolved issues arise such as the lack of interoperability standards for digital multimedia communication protocols. Most crucial to an application of collaboration technology in distance learning is user acceptance. We need to measure reactions by teachers and students to the user interface, develop a new paradigm of teaching and learning which truly takes advantage of the technology but is still acceptable and accessible to the average, non-computer science student and teacher.

Other major issues to be addressed are the hardware and software heterogeneity How do we allow students to participate in a class without imposing or requiring them to use any specific type of hardware and software. It is also important to have an easy-to-use interface with the computer system particularly when you have many users simultaneously interacting with the same applications and with each other.

This workshop focuses on on system and networking issues that include (but are not limited to):

• Effective use of bandwidth (e.g., shared tools responsiveness, high quality audio and reasonable video and image quality).
• Multimedia note-taking
• Digital Recording/Replaying of classes.
• Preparation and presentation of instructional materials.
• Homework submission, grading and testing.
• Collaborative group study, review and tutoring.
• Performance and Scalability.
• Reliability and Fault Tolerance.
• Survey and Feedback tools.
• Synchronization between instructor and students workstations.
• The effective use of multicasting (e.g., reliable multicasting for shared application data, raw multicasting for video).

Preliminary Agenda

Preliminary Agenda

Wednesday, June 19, 1996

Thursday, June 20, 1996

Friday, June 21, 1996

Accepted Papers

• The Software Architecture and Interprocess Communications of IRI: an Internet-based Interactive Distance Learning System *
  H. Abdel-Wahab, K. Maly, A. Youssef, E. Stoica, C.M. Overstreet, C. Wild and A. Gupta, Old Dominion University.
• Distance Education and Online Universities *
  R. Opplinger and A. Albanese, University of Berne, (Switzerland) and ICSI, Berkely.
• The EMSL TeleViewer: A Collaborative Shared Computer Display *
  Paul E. Keller and James D. Myers , Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, WA.
• Educational Applications of Multi-Client Synchronization through Improved Web Graph Semantics *
  Michael Capps, Brian Ladd, David Stotts and Lars S. Nyland, UNC-Chpael-Hill
• Internet, Education and the Web *
  E.N. Houstis, A. Joshi, M. Atallah, S. Weerawarana and A. Elmagarmid, Purdue University.
• An internet based collaborative environment to learn information systems design
  Alberto Faro and Giovanni Gurrieri, University of Catania (Italy) and Concordia University, (Canada).
• CNCplus - A Multimedia Distance Learning Project bringing Universities and Production Together
  K. Muller, M. Lekkou and D. Weydandt, Aachen University of Technology, (Germany).

* - accepted for proceedings

Workshop Organizers

Dr. Hussein Abdel-Wahab
Hussein Abdel-Wahab, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Computer Science
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Virginia, 23529
Phone: (804)-683-4512
Fax: (804)-683-4900
Email: wahab@cs.odu.edu

Dr. Kurt Maly
Kurt Maly, Ph.D.
Kaufman Professor and Chair
Department of Computer Science
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Virginia, 23529
Phone: (804)-683-3915
Fax: (804)-683-4900
Email: maly@cs.odu.edu