Telelearning: New trends in education through global multimedia networks

Abstract

Nowadays Internet universality combined with broadband residential networks can be used to provide advanced multimedia services, not only to large companies and academic organizations, but SMEs and residential users as well. One of the new applications with direct social and enterprise impact is tele-learning. In this paper, a sufficient open architecture able to provide distance learning is described. Combining Web browsing with Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) in various ways, a distributed object-oriented approach is achieved. Over this architecture well defined educational services are provided as methods of distributed objects, in order to allow several institutes and providers of educational information / content, to publish their data in an abstract object-oriented manner. Objects follow a common framework, so as to become widely available and support a highly multimedia profile through the interface to the well known WWW browsers. In order to support authentication and billing over insecure public Internet, special encryption techniques based on utilization of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) are considered.