Abstract:
Migrating an Interactive Collaborative Research Project to Windows NT

Chris Wild, Kurt Maly, Hussein Abdel-Wahab, Ajay Gupta, Mohammed Zubair, C. Michael Overstreet

We account our experiences to date with the migration of a large interactive distance education project known as IRI (Interactive remote instruction) from a Unix based platform to Windows NT. Some of our objectives for this migration include maintaining interoperability with the existing UNIX implementation, providing a research environment for faculty and students, and developing faculty expertise for future teaching and research using the Windows NT platform. The current UNIX based IRI system has been in classroom use for the past two years and is being funded by a three year NSF grant. Part of this grant is the migration of IRI to the PC platform This is a significant tasks for many reasons, including:

- Support of group collabaoration. The present collaboration engine uses the X windows protocols. Thus the set of tools which can be shared is limited to X windows based tools. This leaves out many tools currently used by instructor and students based on the Windows PC system.
- Need for real-time audio and video.
- Support for reliable multicasting protocols.

First approach is based on using a X terminal emulation package (eXceed) which allows a PC to act as an X terminal connected to an X client running on a UNIX workstation. This was percieved as a temporary solution only since it requires a UNIX workstation (running the basic IRI interface) to feed each PC workstation. This approach did give us the XTV collaboration system on the PC but failed to give the real time video streams.

We are currently rewriting the video and audio subsystems using native windows multimedia facilities. This solution should be in place for the FALL 1997 semester.

In parallel we are investigating emerging standards for teleconferencing and audio/video applications. Although there are many products being released for the PC platform, it is too early to tell what impact these standards will have on the distance education market.

Other efforts are being directed at cross platform solutions based on JAVA technology. We currently have a group collaborative WEB brower which allows the teachers and students to view the same WEB pages simutaneously.

Chris Wild