Distance learning technologies and an interactive multimedia educational system

The innovation and development brought by the new technologies in our information era have started to appear in education. Distance learning has become a core educational strategy around the world, with extending to a broad cross-section of online universities and virtual universities. The Internet is providing mechanisms for fundamental changes in the way people learn. Video conferencing, Web conferencing and collaboration provide interactive, real-time multimedia communications for distance learning. We review the evolution of technologies and tools in distance learning, and discuss the current state of distance learning, with a focus on the tools or technologies on the Internet available for distance learning. Then we present a newly developed interactive multimedia educational system. The system is based on a new compression algorithm with low bit-rate, software-implemented video codec to achieve real-time, multicast transport. Finally we provide experimental results of this system.