Network Performance - Impact On Networked Educational Software
Abstract
Although still a debatable issue, it has been increasingly agreed that hypermedia in general and the WWW in particular is an excellent educational tool with its great capability to support for constructivist learning. A great hurdle for its usage however, is the current limitation of the network bandwidth. At the University of Canberra and the University of New South Wales (ADFA), we have developed the "Cross-platform Multimedia Courseware" Project to research into the several areas including network performance. After the release of the courseware on the WWW on 31 August, 1995, statistical data about its performance were collected and analysed. Other statistical datasets were also used to give a more complete overview about the network usage and performance. In general we have found that despite the delay time, the Web is still of practical use for educational purposes. Distributed courseware with realtime activities and interactivities seems still acceptable in terms of time, but does not have a promising future, and in some cases might be usable locally only.
