ATM and satellite distribution of multimedia educational courseware

The Distributed and Interactive Courseware Environment (DICE) is a system for large-scale delivery of multimedia hypertext-based courseware to school sites without high-speed network connectivity using satellite technologies. DICE is being developed on a testbed consisting of (1) a network-resident architecture supported by a high-speed ATM WAN backbone, (2) a classroom-resident architecture consisting of PC LANs in participating school classrooms, and (3) a satellite communications infrastructure serving as a communications link between the network- and classroom-resident architectures. Based on real-time classroom performance evaluation, the network-resident architecture incrementally and adaptively delivers courseware segments to the receiving classroom-resident architecture via satellite