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Since the introduction in 1993 of the World Wide Web and the associated multimedia technologies numerous projects are underway introducing the new tool into introductory physics teaching. This paper will describe two such undertakings: The Cockpit Physics project at the United States Air Force Academy and the WebPhysics project at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis.

The Hellenic Open University has embarked on a large-scale effort to enhance its textbook-based material with content that demonstrably supports the basic tenets of distance learning. The challenge is to set up a framework that allows for the production-level creation, distribution and consumption of content, and at the same time, evaluate the effort in terms of technological, educational and organizational knowledge gained. This paper presents a model of the educational process that is used as a development backbone and argues about its conceptual and technical practicality at large.

Applying data mining methods in the educational field has gained a lot of attention among researchers in recent years. Educational Data Mining has turned into an effective tool for uncovering hidden relationships in educational data and predicting students’ learning outcomes. Several supervised methods have been successfully applied with the purpose of identifying students at risk of failing or of predicting their academic performance. Recently, the implementation of Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods in the educational process indicated their superiority over the supervised ones. SSL is an emerging subfield of machine learning seeking to effectively exploit a small pool of labeled examples together with a large pool of unlabeled ones. On this basis, a small number of students’ data from previous years may be used as the training set of a learning model to predict future outcomes of current students. A number of rewarding studies deal with the implementation of classification methods in the educational field in contrast to regression, which is deemed to be a slightly touched task. In this paper, a novel semi-supervised regression (SSR) algorithm is presented for predicting the final grade of undergraduate students in a distance online course. To the best of our knowledge there is no study dealing with the implementation of SSR methods in the educational field. A plethora of attributes related to students’ characteristics, academic performance and interaction within the course online platform form the training set, while several experiments were carried out confirming the superiority of the proposed algorithm over familiar regression methods. The experiment results show that the predictive performance of the proposed algorithm is increasing significantly over time, achieving a MAE value of less than 1.2358 before the middle of the academic year, which provides the advantage of early warnings and interventions.

Distance learning programs use on-line video records to deliver pre-recorded lectures. And, video communication systems can be used as a discussion tool. In this paper, we start our discussion on a multimedia presentation recording system which we had developed. We then present how the video recording concept can be further extended to realize an augmented video conferencing system, which can be used as a peer-to-peer discussion tool, as well as a lecture broadcasting system. We also point out that an object tracking technology can be further integrated to enhance the tool, to enable a more realistic and useful system for the discussion in distance education.

The traditional teaching system uses local area network to realize online teaching, which leads to high stability and hardware load of the teaching system and makes it difficult to meet the teaching demand. To solve the above problems, a dance movement distance learning system based on wireless network communication technology is designed. On the B/S architecture, the hardware control module and communication module of the system are designed. The fuzzy set principle is used to evaluate the students’ dance cognitive ability, so as to personalize the recommended teaching contents. The teaching video is compressed according to H.264/AV compression standard to reduce the system transmission and processing load. The system functionality test results show that the maximum transmission packet loss rate of the designed system is 8.3%, and the lost data does not interfere with teaching, has low computer memory consumption, and has superior performance.

The Internet-mediated distance learning has received a lot of attention in both universities and corporations in the past few years. With the proliferation of new network and multimedia technologies, there is an increasing need for delivering TV-like video lectures. The Cisco IP/TV system has been widely used as an efficient platform in supporting TV-like lectures in MPEG-1 format. However, since it relies on Microsoft multimedia technology, IP/TV cannot be architecture-neutral. Further, in spite that a Web interface to IP/TV is provided, it lacks in application program interfaces to endorse the development of interaction applications between instructors and students. Both limitations can be relieved by appealing to the emerging Java technology. However, playing RTP/MPEG objects using JMF (Java Media Framework) is a non-trivial task. This paper presents a novel Java-based TV-like distance learning system by integrating Cisco IP/TV and Java JMF technology so that the superiority of both models can be complemented. In particular, we enhance the JMF engine to make playing RTP/MPEG media objects over the Internet possible. This system offers two learning modes, namely on-demand learning via unicast connection and scheduled learning via multicast connection. A course sample and its performance evaluation are illustrated to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of delivering TV-like courseware. Furthermore, synchronous distance learning services can be implemented at less cost.

Due to the development of Internet, many human behaviors were adapted to the virtual world, such as E-commerce, E-education, and E-entertainment, etc. Among these, distance learning or E-Education will play an important role in the near future. This paper provides an Electronic Mobile Notebook authoring tool used by students in a virtual university environment. The Electronic Mobile Notebook tool was developed on the Web, allowing the user to scratch notes on-the-fly. We design a schedule-oriented methodology to achieve the utility of mobile storage. Therefore, students can edit or read their notebook anywhere any time. User can design his/her schedule on the Web to describe his/her event, time, position, and action. A personal agent can monitor the schedule and perform the action, such as transferring data to the indicated position. The mobile agent will choose the shortcut such as a smart message to carry user's data according to the schedule. User can read his/her data without going through a time consuming data transfer. We also provide the architecture of the Electronic Mobile Notebook tool as well as a Mobile Storage Replication Manager (MSRM), which handles these transactions.

The virtual programming lab (VPL) project described in this paper is designed to facilitate Internet access to application software. It emulates a real computing laboratory environment that promotes group learning and project management. The laboratory resources are situated at the university and are centrally controlled. Users of the virtual programming laboratory include students, tutors and administrators of the system. Users can be located at different geographical locations to remotely access applications through the Internet. The virtual programming lab design is based on a distance education concept.

This paper focuses on the design and development of the runtime modules within the VPL framework. These runtime modules provide underlying services that drive the launching of applications, file management and communications services. In addition, this paper presents an evaluation of the performance of the system.

When distance learning becomes more and more popular, prodding the students into high and constant motivation has been an interesting research issue these years. In this paper, we introduce a Web-based learning system which provides a dynamic interaction environment for the students to share their information with each other. The system aims to make the distance learning program a fascinating game allowing students to get their scores and ranking interactively.

Simultaneous learning is a method that complements the traditional place base learning with new ways of teaching–learning process while potentially impacting higher education at almost every level, ranging from state-level policy to classroom management. The very concept has been traditionally considered a precarious idea for the integrity of physical learning institutions as it encourages the adoption of alternate mechanisms in the shape of remote learning, synchronous and asynchronous online platforms, and mobile technologies. Different models of open universities have been introduced to accomplish the job with different contextual objectives, ranging from access to students from remote areas to the inculcation of technology in the teaching–learning process. Although simultaneous learning methods are being adopted vehemently in the developed world, up until now, these have not been considered vital in the developing world. This lag is partly due to the mindset of the educational managers who consider these methods as a threat to the place base learning institutions or as a deficient method in addressing the holistic development of learners. Policymakers also believe in and rely on the traditional approaches amid their “Red-Tapism” and “Status-quo”. The outbreak of COVID-19 has proved to be icebreaking in this regard as different forms of simultaneous learning in the form of blended and hybrid learning have been overwhelmingly used during the pandemic. It seems to be the future of higher education and instructors are making efforts to learn, develop, and manage this form of learning during the pandemic and beyond. However, as with the nature of revolutionary changes, the pitfalls are also concatenated with this adaptation which if not addressed timely and properly may prove counterproductive.

Topic Study Group 49 built on current and emerging research in distance learning, e-learning and blended learning. Specifically, we pushed the boundaries of what is known through a deeper examination and discussion of recent research and development in teaching and learning through these modalities, with a focus on primary, secondary, and higher education.

Modern farmers distance education in rural areas is important for enhancing the level of information and building farmers lifelong education system. A new personalized recommendation algorithm is proposed based on the analysis of traditional personalization algorithms and the actual needs of farmers, which is based on collaborative filtering algorithm. An improved item-based recommendation algorithm is to predict the users' score. The experimental results for verification algorithm show that the algorithm has better accuracy. The algorithm is applied to the farmers distance education personalized recommendation system, and has a better application effect.