1 IRI - H , A Java - Based Distance Education System : Its Architecture and Performance

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