Quality of service issues in distributed learning environments

The growing presence of digital multimedia in everyday life, as evidenced by the continuing increase in Internet usage, is expected to augment or replace traditional modes of social and economic interaction. Face-to-face meetings, paperwork, and office-space are all expected to diminish in importance as cyberspace provides new facilities and interaction modes. In the higher education sector distributed learning environments (DLEs) are being cited as solutions to the ambitious political goals of better education, wider access and lower costs. DLEs are still in their infancy however, and if they are to succeed in transforming conventional educational practice they must become quality of service (QoS) aware. The notion of QoS originated in computer networking but if it is not addressed appropriately in all a system components then there may be little or no benefit for that system's users, regardless of the network quality. There is a real danger that policy makers in the educational sphere will simply equate network level QoS with the needs of the end users, namely teachers and students. Our experience with the TAGS framework for constructing DLEs has shown that QoS must be taken into account from many perspectives before traditional educational processes can be satisfactorily transformed. This paper contributes towards an understanding of QoS issues in distributed learning environments by reviewing the network perspective and augmenting it with other, equally important, concerns.