An Instance of CSCW: The Remote Class

Today, the related topics about CSCW mainly focus on the three aspects as follows. The first one is how to satisfy general requirement by technical support, the second one is about social-technical gap, and the last one is how to evaluate the system. In this paper, we approach remote class, one instance of CSCW, from these three aspects. Due to the unprecedented information explosion and rapid growth of technology, education and continuous education is much more important than ever before, and this trend will be more and more obvious in the future. Unfortunately, local education, applicable only in the presence of appropriate space and time, can not fully cater to people’s demands on education. As a consequence, distance education, free from constraints on space and time, becomes an excellent supplement to traditional education. By far, however, distance education function far from as satisfactorily as it is supposed to be owing to its own limitation, so we had to admit the fact that there is an inherent gap between distance education and local education. Recently, remote class supported by computer and network, one kind of distance education, looks promising because it greatly neutralizes the inherent limitation of distance education. This paper first elaborates the necessity of remote class. And then, we discuss the main technical barriers in fulfilling the general requirements of remote class and discuss the social-technical gap of the remote class system. Finally, we provide a new objective way to evaluate the remote class.