Experiences with the electronic classroom-QoS issues in an advanced teaching and research facility

Distance education refers to all types of studies in which students are separated in space and/or time. The electronic classroom at the University of Oslo overcomes separations in space by exchanging digital audio, video, and whiteboard information between different sites. This paper presents measurements and analysis results of transport level and application level quality-of-service (QoS) aspects of the electronic classroom, as well as general experiences with it. The lessons learned represent the motivation for the ongoing extension to support asynchronous teaching by a multimedia database system (MMDBS) to manage data used and generated in the classroom. The main emphasis of this research activity is on QoS support from the MMDBS.