Real-time multimedia-based education through the Internet

The rapid advances in computer and communications technologies are challenging the American education systems to provide increased educational opportunities beyond the traditional geographic boundaries at a reasonable cost. Many educational institutions are answering this challenge by developing distance education programs. Distance education provides effective learning environment. An important requirement for effective distance education is the availability of continuous interactivity and immediate feedback. Over the Internet, synchronous sharing of multimedia content introduces unacceptable delays as network bandwidth is limited. In this thesis, the issue of Internet bandwidth is minimized and a novel system is developed for distance education using multimedia course material over the Internet. The data rich multimedia materials reside at remote computers and are only remotely activated utilizing low bandwidth signals over the Internet. As a result, the large download times associated with multimedia files are eliminated creating an almost real time link between the remote locations