Internet course delivery-making it easier and more effective

Since 1997, Georgia Tech has been delivering courses across the Atlantic to its sister campus in France using streaming media. Our experience has shown that there are two significant obstacles that must be overcome before faculty and students are ready to embrace this technology, and accept this delivery mechanism for distance learning courses. First, in order for faculty to become involved in the development of "online" courses, the production process must be easy and convenient. Second, before either faculty or students are willing to go "online", both must be convinced that there are advantages to an Internet-based course over video-tapes and, in fact, advantages over a classroom, such as searching and indexing, assessment, and the ability to view or re-view a lecture "on-demand". In this paper, we describe some of our efforts over the last year to overcome these obstacles. First, we describe a "turnkey" system that we have developed for producing streaming media lectures that makes the production of online courses very easy. Second, we describe some of our work in creating a database from Postscript slides that is used in a powerful and effective information retrieval system.