Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/223307

Title

Traffic modeling of online multimedia education

Author(s)

Lavery, Bill;  Cricenti, Tony

Abstract

Broadband Internet access will rapidly proliferate beyond the education and business sectors to become available in homes and workplaces. This will open up new opportunities and new challenges for tertiary education to go online---that is, for educational services to be delivered to students at home and in their workplace, overcoming the time and travel constraints of conventional place-based face-to-face educational methods. Thus, Internet-delivered online multimedia education (OLME) is likely to develop into a major mechanism for the provision of off-campus education, and if so, it will represent a significant component of Internet traffic. In this OLME, a student uses a personal computer to access (over the broadband Internet) an educational server computer, the latter typically at a university or other educational service provider. The student's PC (the client) downloads software from the university computer (the server), and then executes that software on the client. The student learns by working through the material presented and interacting with the executing software, which typically includes information presentation, simulations, tutorials, and formative tests. In addition to this learning process, there will generally be an assessment process, also conducted online. At first sight, it might appear that this type of education is not very different from distance education, and indeed online education is sometimes perceived as being essentially just distance education delivered electronically rather than physically. The authors believe that this latter view is fundamentally incorrect. We believe that a more appropriate view of tomorrow's OLME can be found in today's high-quality educational CD-ROMs [e.g., Ryan 97], for the latter will set market expectations [Sykes & Sewell 96]. Thus good-quality OLME of the foreseeable future will be characterized as follows. Presentation of the material to be mastered will be engaging, using multimedia technologies; for example, students will rarely be presented with substantial blocks of text to be read on the screen. There will be high levels of interaction, in which the learner learns by "hands-on" experimentation, typically adjusting the parameters of simulations to complete some specified tasks, observing the consequences of actions and choices, and thereby developing working understandings of the underlying principles. The presentation of the simulations will be very realistic, approaching that of virtual reality, resulting in a high degree of engagement of the learner with the lesson. There will be ample problem solving, exercises, and tests to promote concept clarification and deep learning. Personalized and student-centered lessons will guide the student through lessons in the most appropriate manner applicable to the individual student. Internet-conveyed student-to-student and student-to-teacher communication will be inherent and commonplace, and provide the group cohesion required to inhibit the debilitating isolation so common in today's distance education. Students will function with a globally connected paradigm, routinely and self-directedly accessing resources and support from the global Internet and its community. In this paper we consider the characterization of the traffic emanating from OLME servers when serving a number of OLME clients over the broadband Internet. We consider three elements: 1. We propose a model for the OLME study process, which leads to theoretic models of the traffic emanating from a OLME server to service the study process of individual OLME clients; by combining multiple clients we derive a server source traffic model for serving multiple clients. The resultant model is a very bursty traffic generator, for which simulations confirm very effective statistical multiplexing. 2. We describe measurements taken of server traffic to individual clients when using a number of commercially available OLME packages, and use the traffic measurements to validate and refine the theoretic model of 1. 3. We describe traffic measurements for an OLME server while conducting online evaluation for many students simultaneously, using a proprietary online assessment package. We anticipate that the user data transfer process of such online assessment will be substantially different from the data transfer process when learning new material. We then comment on the significance of these traffic models for the performance of the OLME application, considering architecture, traffic mix, and quality-of-service capabilities envisaged for the broadband Internet.

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology

Source

Proceedings of 'The internet global summit', the 9th Annual International Networking Conference of the Internet Society (INET 1999), San Jose, California, United States, 22-25 June 1999

Publication year

1999

Keyword(s)

Broadband;  Computer networks;  Computer-based learning;  Elearning;  E-learning;  Internet;  Internet-delivered online multimedia education;  OLME;  Traffic modeling

Publisher

Internet Society

ISBN

9781891562068, 1891562061

Publisher URL

http://www.isoc.org/inet99/proceedings/4e/4e_1.htm

Copyright

Copyright © 1999 Internet Society.

Peer reviewed