An experiment of application sharing on MuX-based interactive multimedia distance home study system

Deals with the experimental development of application-sharing technology for MIDOS, a MuX-based interactive distance home study system. Based on MuX, which is a multimedia I/O server system that has been developed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), MIDOS has been developed as a typical application for the Korean Information Infrastructure. The application-sharing facility is incorporated into MIDOS as a vehicle for sharing existing applications and educational materials on a server system. It may contribute to expanding the utility of home PCs from being used only in a stand-alone mode and in a monomedia-based noninteractive mode to being used as a workstation for face-to-face interaction and collaboration in learning. Through an experiment on the application-sharing facility of MIDOS, several structural considerations were looked at, while the pros and cons of the different architectures considered were compared. By using this application-sharing facility, MIDOS becomes a useful platform for distance learning because the facility enables the sharing of various existing educational applications, such as CAI (computer aided instruction) applications, courseware, CD-ROM titles, video materials and knowledge bases, without any modification, and it also overcomes the lack of computing power to execute intelligent applications in client platforms, because the facility enables one to share the abstracted behavior of complex executions in intelligent applications running on a server system.