Supporting Distance Education over the Internet

Distance education has been the topic of much research in the past years. However, much of this research has been aimed at constructing distance education environments that require high-bandwidth network connections and specialized equipment. Use of these systems has so far been largely limited to a few well-funded research groups, while many educational institutions, particularly in less developed countries, have been deprived of this possibility altogether. The advent of the Internet, however, has brought an aaordable medium to these organizations and enabled distance education without the need for costly equipment and networks. Due to the inherent bandwidth limitations, systems that work over the Internet are necessarily more limited in their possibilities for delivering distance learning to students, and are unable to produce the same rich educational experience of the more costly systems. To alleviate these problems, we have developed a distance learning system that makes use of repli-cated databases and speech synthesis to overcome some of the limitations of Internet-based systems and to deliver a richer and more acceptable learning experience.