A Virtual Educational Environment: Desktop Distant Teaching and Learning Systems

A successful virtual educational environment must be able to emulate the kernel of traditional environment. That is, the interactions must be maintained to preserve the relationship between the teacher and learners in the on-line class, and the relationship among the off-line learners. We developed two systems to provide the needed functions which can provide on-line and off-line interactions. One is " desktop victual classroom system on Mbone ". This system can handle the interaction between the teacher and learners of traditional educational environment. It provides a distant teaching environment in which chairmen (teachers) and participants(learners) can be connected remotely from their own workstation sites. The chairman can create a class session for participants to join and multicast his or her video/audio to all participants in the session so that participants can see/hear the chairman's video/audio from their monitors/speakers. A Class Session Control Protocol is developed to allow the chairman of a session to control the class entrance and video/audio sending of participants in this session. The other one is " CORAL * : a multi-server distant cooperative learning system ". The system can handle the interaction among the learners. The system is a WWW-based distant and cooperative learning system which provide (1) users to access remote class materials, find learning partners, and conduct cooperative learning; (2) instructors to monitor and study learning activities; (3) managers to operate and maintain their local servers independently.