Distance education and on-line universities

Focuses on distance education in general, and online universities in particular. It argues that online universities have to cooperate with commercial service providers to disseminate lectures to a wide audience, and that this cooperation requires new techniques with regard to the registration, validation and certification of the parties involved, such as professors, service providers and students. As a possible solution, the paper also proposes an extension of a technique named DiRK (Distributed Registration and Key distribution) that has been proposed previously. The technique can be used in a conferencing system, e.g. the Internet Multicast Backbone (MBone), to handle participants' registration, validation and key distribution in a decentralized and fully distributed way. DiRK is being prototyped in a session registration tool (SRT) for the MBone, and the SRT will serve as a starting-point to develop similar tools that can be used in distance education to set up and run online universities.