Potential and limitations of a teleteaching environment based on H.323 audio-visual communication systems

The effective support of teleteaching services requires the development of multimedia collaboration systems that are capable of providing real-time and high quality audio-visual communication among distributed instructors and students. In the absence of such specialised systems, technologies tailored to other services are being considered for teleteaching services as well. Such a technology is the H.323 audio-visual communication technology developed to support video communication over IF. Although teleteaching and videoconferencing have similar QoS requirements, teleteaching functional requirements are a superset of those of videoconferencing. In this paper, the suitability of H.323 technology and currently available products to support teleteaching services is investigated, based on experience gained during a related deployment at the University of Athens. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved