June 2000 — Features
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One-Stop Shopping in an Online Educational Mall
A Multimedia Web-Based Teaching/Learning Environment
Nova Southeastern University (NSU) has been delivering online courses to learners in their homes using the UNIX environment since 1983. The learners meet in real-time using an Electronic Classroom (ECR) designed specifically to be used by learners from their homes. Communication between learners and teachers in the recent past was limited to ASCII text. This changed with the advent of the World Wide Web, and today several multimedia tools make it possible for teachers to use audio, graphics, and video in their online courses. The client/server computing paradigm has made it possible to modularize various aspects of the environment and share resources across the institution and even to remote servers in learners' workplaces or home environments. In this article, the authors discuss the development and implementation of a system of tools for faculty and learners. This system is part of an overall reengineering effort at NSU to bring the online learning environment in touch with learner and faculty needs for computing and educational tools. The system we describe here is called "ClassLeader" and contains a rich set of online tools for teachers and learners.
This reengineering effort has produced major changes in the system of online education. These changes have involved increasing the bandwidth of network access to learners' homes, providing access to all learners regardless of location, migrating all academic users to SUN SPARC servers, raising disk quotas to accommodate increased use of image files, developing a single point of entry to all academic servers, and transforming the legacy text-based and terminal emulation-based "green screen" tools to a multimedia, client/server, browser-based, integrated environment. The tools in the system have been focused mainly on adding multimedia capabilities to previously text-based utilities where possible, but for the most part, new tools have been developed from scratch.
Today, the Web-based multimedia system that we use in our classes at NSU enables any learner's project to become a training opportunity for other learners, and even for individuals outside the immediate course environment. The significant thing about this is that many learners for the first time are getting an opportunity to take charge of their own learning environment, and hopefully to begin harnessing a vast array of information resources for their own use and to share with others.
Not only are the number of Internet users and Web sites still increasing in the new millennium, but the manner in which things are done is changing in new and exciting ways. These changes reflect not only the use of multimedia, but also a heightened focus on interactive experiences on Web sites. This is made possible by the use of CGI scripts, Java applets, and the concept of "frames." If we can extrapolate from the amazing growth of multimedia and interactivity on the Web, the future holds a great deal of promise for education. In the past five years, we've gone from getting excited about HTML editors and converters to reaping the benefits of cutting edge developments in browsers, multimedia plug-ins, and programming applets and agents. One of those systems is described in this article.
