1 An Architecture and Initial Performance Data for a JAVA - based Distance Education System

We describe our motivation and vision for a reimplementation of our Interactive Remote Instruction (IRI) system that supports synchronous and asynchronous distance education. The new version is coded in Java and executes on several different platforms. We used the original system to teach scores of university classes over the past five years at sites up to 300 km apart. This system was built as a prototype, its use in real classes has forced us to deal with crucial issues in distributed education instruction systems. The new implementation of IRI, called IRI-h (h for heterogeneous), extends the IRI system both to multiple platforms and to heterogeneous network infrastructure, including delivery to the home user. This paper describes the architecture of the new implementation, experiences with the developing prototype including preliminary performance evaluation, and unresolved issues to be addressed.