A collaborative multimedia distance education system running on DooRae

This paper describes the experience from a multimedia collaborative distance education system, DooRae-EDUS, running since April 1995 at SKKU (Sung Kwan Kwan Univ.) in Korea, which implemented on a multimedia application crafting framework DooRae. DooRae-EDUS provides students as well as teachers with several functions and features enough for developing much more natural multimedia collaborative applications as well as multimedia distance education system. They include session management, access control, concurrency control, and invitation guest lectures and handling of late comers to the running session on DooRae. The media control agent of DooRae, in charge of manipulating audio and video data streams allows multiple participants in local and remote area to make it possible to achieve natural face-to-face feelings during session in various mode of interactions among them, which means that DooRae is an integrated and application-, and technology- independent middleware for PC based platforms. We also show that such an integrated testbed as DooRae, incorporating CMC (computer mediated communication) technology and multimedia would be of great help to address most problems facing conventional distance education systems heavily dependent on video conferencing technology over CATV broadcasting networks.