Meeting Interactive Response Targets in Distributed Learning Environments

Distributed Learning Environments (DLEs) represent the hope that communications and information technology can improve and widen access to education while maintaining and improving its quality. Such multi–user environments consist of web-oriented networked applications and services. Our experiences so far have shown that good interactive response time is crucial to their success. Slow responses can quickly dissuade teachers and learners alike from investing their time in the use of these services. Students expect the types of real–time response they get from computer games, while staff expect the immediacy typical of single-user applications on a personal computer. In general, a key goal of a DLE is to deliver a response to the users' screen in less than one second. This abstract describes some of the work carried out to test, analyse and improve interactive response times in Finesse [1], a DLE for finance education.