Workshop on Distance Learning

A number of technical and policy issues need to be addressed and solved before multimedia applications can take advantage of the Internet. We currently have the resources to enable, in a very limited way, multimedia. communication and collaboration among groups, and to manage these interactions. Scaling these groups to hundreds of students will necessitate management tools for handling the various multimedia streams, allocating bandwidth to them; it will require new protocols for controlling these streams as well as new protocols for student-teacher interactions. Perhaps even more importantly, we need to improve the performance of existing collaboration and conferencing tools by an order of magnitude by such techniques as reliable multicasting for data traffic and efficient utilization of the underlying network. A whole new set of unresolved issues is rising, such as the lack of interoperability standards for digital multimedia communication protocols. Most crucial to an application of collaboration technology in distance learning is user acceptance. We need to measure reactions by teachers and students to the user interface and develop a new paradigm for teaching and learning that truly takes advantage of the technology but is still acceptable and accessible to average, non-computer science students and teachers.