The virtual university: Making it happen

Teaching at universities is mostly constrained to using blackboards, overhead transparencies and sometimes flip– charts as basic tools. In order to consolidate the course material, and as a preparation to written or oral exams, students have been using course notes, textbooks or copies of transparencies for decades. However, with the advent of powerful hardware and network technology, the concepts of computer-based education, which make it possible to follow university curricula independent of time and space, is now becoming a reality. Conversely to most approaches to this topic, which either focus on developing authoring tools for the realization of CBT courses, or on remote broadcasting of lectures, we are working on merging these two concepts in order to make full use of new technologies as a supplement to traditional teaching at university level. As an example, we are working on developing an educational environment in the area of algorithms and data structures on the basis of Hyper–G, a powerful, second–generation hypermedia system. In section 2, we will describe a few scenarios for the enhancement of traditional teaching methods wee were considering for the development of a prototype at our institute (see section 3). We conclude by discussing some crucial aspects for our future research (see section 4).