Research Seminar - March 07, 2003

The Virtual University:
Heralding the End of University Instruction as We Know it?

Abstract:

Current Internet technology allows traditional campus-based universities to enter the business of distance education. It seems to be quite natural to use computers for delivery of courses. However, traditional universities have discovered that the production of rich-media contents for web-based distance courses is extremely expensive. Moreover, offering distance courses also necessitates the establishment of completely new services that are different from the traditional way of teaching. Hence, it is not surprising that in Germany and many other European countries it is still an exception that a student enrolled in a campus-based university can earn credits by taking a web course offered by another university.

In this talk Thomas Ottmann will draw upon his personal experience on running the "Virtual University of the Upper Rhine Valley", providing distance courses offered by a consortium of German universities.

• He will first analyse the reasons why it is so difficult for campus-based universities to virtualize parts of their curricula.
• Then he will argue that the production of e-lectures by presentation recording and the use of e-lectures as the core of future web courses may be a possible way to overcome some of the difficulties.
• Thomas Ottmann will discuss the technical requirements influencing the quality of producing and using e-lectures for distance education. His arguments are based on experiences gained over the last couple of years in several large scale joint projects. These projects have the ambitious goal of allowing students enrolled in a campus-based university to study Computer and Information Science as a mixture between traditional on-site and web-based distance courses.

Thomas Ottmann's group has developed new tools for the fully automatic production of e-lectures as well as the technical infrastructure for virtualizing lectures, assignment submission, and tutorial guidance. The tools and techniques discussed in this talk will also be useful for flexible delivery of courses at campus-based universities as well as delivery of short courses and training materials in industry.