A Tool for Dependable and Distributable Presentations

Abstract

At the end of this decade, the Lisbon 2010 goals are to be reached. One of these goals is the virtual classroom preceding the virtual office, familiarizing students with the demands of an online workplace. Today’s eLearning platforms offer a wide variety of learning styles. Nearly every university offers electronic courses. While the connectivity to ICT infrastructures is rising, there is still a need to ensure that eLearning opportunities are equally available across geographic, social and personal boundaries. The Lisbon goals cannot be reached, if the underlying software is expensive and opaque. This work presents one substantial element for virtual classrooms, as well as for virtual workplaces. It is a tool to remotely control presentations of the most popular presentation software, enabling virtual seminars or virtual conferences at different hosts, simultaneously distributing high-quality presentations at different locations or, to do dependable presentations on different hosts at the same location with low bandwidth demands. A pleasant side effect is that disabled people now have a well-priced opportunity to remotely control presentations. The software is written in Java and thus portable to other platforms. The communication can be easily secured through VPN.