Effective and Efficient Distance Learning over the Internet: Tools and Techniques

Abstract: Georgia Tech has been delivering courses across the Atlantic to its sister campus in France using streaming media for several years. Our experience has shown that there are two major obstacles that must be overcome before faculty and students are ready to embrace this technology and accept this delivery mechanism for distance learning courses. First, in order for faculty to become involved in the development of online courses, the production process must be convenient and relatively simple, which is generally not the case. Second, before either faculty or students are willing to participate in online courses, both must be convinced that there are advantages to an Internet-based course over videotapes and, in fact, over a traditional classroom environment. In this paper we describe our efforts over the last two years in addressing these problems. We first describe a set of tools that we have developed for producing streaming media lectures, and then discuss some of our current work in enhancing these tools for the delivery of more effective interactive educational materials both remotely and in the classroom environment