An interactive distance education service utilising the World Wide Web - a preliminary study

This paper describes an innovative distance education service based on the World Wide Web (WWW) and an Internet based videophone service. The WWW is used to provide a slide display function similar to that provided by presentation systems such as PowerPoint^TM. By using the WWW, slides for presentation in a lecture are available to students located away from the site of a lecture. The system described in this paper provides the lecturer with a facility to simultaneously control the display of slides to the local audience and to the remote students. A prototype system was used to verify the pedagogical soundness of the approach. In this case, no significant difference was found between the information retained from the lecture between the students attending in the lecturer room and those attending at remote locations. The generic system developed as a result of the prototype, and a verification trial on the system are described I. Introduction A number of interactive distance educatio..