Distance education and on-line universities

This paper focuses on distance education in general , and online universities in particular. It argues that online universities have to cooperate with commercial service providers to disseminate lectures to a wide audience, and that this cooperation requires new techniques with regard to the registration, validation, and certiication of the parties involved, such as professors , service providers, and students. As a possible solution, the paper also proposes an extension of a technique named DiRK (Distributed Registration and Key distribution) that has been proposed previously. The technique can be used in a conferencing system, such as e.g. the Internet Multicast Backbone (MBone), to handle participants registration, validation , and key distribution in a decentralized and fully distributed way. DiRK is being prototyped in a session registration tool (srt) for the MBone, and the srt will serve as a starting-point to develop similar tools that can be used in distance education to set up and run online universities.