This is a three student virtual classroom. All three students and the professors computer's are connected to a textual conferencing system running on a university's UNIX host system. The professor's connection is via the university campus network. The three students are connected via modems and standard phone lines to Delphi or some other internet access provider. Once connected to Delphi the students can use the rlogin command to connect to the university's UNIX host system. The professor and students are also connected on a standard audio conference call.
Business Situation: Shortage of Qualified Teachers
With limited staffs and budgets, today's schools, colleges and universities must maximize their existing teaching resources while coping with rapidly expanding student needs. Sending instructors out to satellite campuses, wastes precious time and money and presentations by guest lecturers often cannot be delivered to all the students who would benefit from them.
Customer Need: Maximizing Resources
Schools needs a flexible cost effective way to maximize their teaching resources in order to reach students with varying needs in diverse settings
Solution: The Virtual Meeting Classroom Edition The Virtual Meeting can be used over the schools systems existing Wide Area Network without impacting the performance of the already busy Local Area Network at each school or the inter campus network backbone.
Instructors can deliver tele-lectures, discussions, interactive lab assignments and examinations while monitoring for student questions. Students can raise their hands electronically to ask questions at any time. Questions or answers can be explained using the live WhiteBoard. Slide shows and computer based movies can be shown to all students simultaneously. Hypercard Stacks or Toolbooks created by the instructor can be incorporated into the curriculum and can be presented to each student while being controlled by the instructor.
Multimedia distance learning using The Virtual Meeting maximizes scarce teaching resources, increases student motivation and enhances instructors skills while eliminating travel time and costs.
The Virtual Meeting Classroom Edition is available for Macintosh and Windows 3.1 and consists of the following software components for each student
One copy of the Instructor Extension is required for each instructor
Copyright 1996 by Seth Snyder All Rights Reserved