Teaching on the Internet2

As we discussed last week, the Internet2 is envisioned as a breeding ground for collaboration in the development of new networking technologies among academia, business, government, and other agencies. With contributors from all over the globe, there will naturally be a widely geographically distributed flavor to these efforts, and communication will be of utmost importance. From this base comes one of Internet2's initial activities, namely the development of a system and standards for a software-based instructional paradigm.

LearningWare is the collective term for a series of building blocks for an educational architecture. The goal of this endeavor is the development of tools and technologies which will be platform independent to allow simultaneous use by users at sites around the world with widely disparate system specifications. Because of this requirements, the efforts in this area have quite naturally evolved toward object-oriented designs and distributed object technologies such as Java. The tools currently available and their associated standards will not be sufficient for the goal of a standardized networked teaching environment, but they will be the base from which the desired standards and utilities can be built. Because of the features of object-oriented technology, the same bricks which build a utility for the chemistry professor can also be used in the construction of a tool for teaching a web class.

The reason that the Internet2 project is defining suitable technological building blocks and templates is the plan to create the Instructional Management System (IMS). The IMS is an ambitious set of standards and utilities designed to manage a distributed learning environment over a network. It allows teachers to create a protocol for the entire learning experience, from the choosing of learning materials, to making assignments, to evaluating student performance, and so on. While this is done in most teaching settings, what is special about the IMS is that this is only half of the process. The implementation and management of the learning system laid out by the teachers is handled by the platforms and software developed from the building blocks discussed above. Subjects in different geographic locations thus receive the same interpretations of the plan of action through electronic means. This concept holds great promise for the easy and wide dissemination of important material, as well as conveniences such as self-paced learning.

This exciting concept will undoubtedly lie at the heart of Internet2's future endeavors and promises to hold much value for the education and research communities at large. And while this project is quite ambitious and potentially very important, it does not represent the entire scope of

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