Synchronous distance education via the Internet

Describes a vision for networked distance education and ongoing experiments intended to increase our understanding of how distance education can be conducted most successfully at the university level. Our vision includes the relationship between delivery media and modes in the future learning environment, the role of information technologies in scholarship, and the benefits of unlimited access to global information resources. A special concern is the effective use of various media in distance education. For example, the traditional role of video delivery is analyzed and seen to be, in many cases, more a matter of past necessity than effective future delivery. In support of our conclusions a series of experiments conducted at the author´s university are described. These have involved teaching real, for-credit courses to remote students using the Internet. While many universities are experimenting with asynchronous delivery via e-mail, Web and related technologies, our work is unusual in that it involves synchronous delivery. The most enlightening of our experiments involved use of the Internet multicast backbone (Mbone) and its associated suite of multimedia tools. Ongoing experiments involve use of commercial off-the-shelf multimedia with low-cost workstations and a commercial Internet service