Papers in PDF format

1 Introduction
The Virtual University: Making It Happen
Matthias O. Will
Institut für Informatik
Universität Freiburg
e-mail: will@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Teaching at universities is mostly constrained to using blackboards, overhead transparencies and sometimes
flip-charts as basic tools. In order to consolidate the course material, and as a preparation to written or oral
exams, students have been using course notes, textbooks or copies of transparencies for decades.
However, with the advent of powerful hardware and network technology, the concepts of computer-based
education, which make it possible to follow university curricula independent of time and space, is now
becoming a reality. Conversely to most approaches to this topic, which either focus on developing authoring
tools for the realization of CBT courses, or on remote broadcasting of lectures, we are working on merging
these two concepts in order to make full use of new technologies as a supplement to traditional teaching at
university level. As an example, we are working on developing an educational environment in the area of
algorithms and data structures on the basis of Hyper-G, a powerful, second-generation hypermedia system.
In section 2, we will describe a few scenarios for the enhancement of traditional teaching methods wee were
considering for the development of a prototype at our institute (see section 3). We conclude by discussing some
crucial aspects for our future research (see section 4).
2 Enhancing Traditional University Education: A Starting Point
The traditional approach for university education can be seen from two viewpoints. Depending on the course
type, the professor first makes an outline to find out what kind of material he will use, followed by gathering
all kinds of scientific material (books, journal articles) on the relevant topic to prepare each course unit. When
teaching the course, he uses any combination of his own notes, overhead transparencies or slides. Of course, if
the course has been taught before, only little effort is necessary to keep the course material up to date.
On the other hand, the student is often given an outline of the course along with a list of relevant course
material, which can either be bought or borrowed from a library. Sometimes, copies of the transparencies or
lecture notes are handed out. Thus, students can benefit from a potentially large number of written material to
later review the course or lecture at home. Additionally, tutorials are often offered to support the student in his
learning process.
This technique has worked well for decades and therefore can be used as a good starting point in order to keep
the advantages for both parties while guaranteeing a smooth transition to tomorrow's university education.
Since the basis for university education are lectures and printed materials, a first scenario would be the
automatic conversion of lectures into multimedia documents ([OBa95], [BaO96]), which can then be inserted
into a Web server and combined with digital library access, thus making the lecture available publicly
unconstrained by time and space. This would solve the problem of lectures having to travel frequently to
deliver the same course at different universities.
By adding multimedia documents (e. g. animations, simulations) to digitized texts, interlinking them and
storing them into a multimedia database server, it is possible to benefit even more from computer-specific
resources.