IRI-h, A Java-based Distance Education System: 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 allows 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 article we describe IRI-h’s architectural experiences with the developing prototype, including preliminary performance evaluation, and also unresolved issues still to be addressed