An infrastructure for collaborative teleteaching

Teleteaching is a typical application of collaborative environments. As a basis for implementing teleteaching scenarios, sophisticated distributed software platforms and advanced networking facilities are required. This paper presents such an infrastructure and discusses recent results with its experimental use. In addition to key technological issues such as multimedia information management and distribution, important other aspects of collaborative work are discussed in this context; examples are user interaction, content provision, and acceptance of given solutions. Evaluating the experiences with this collaborative environment, an extended, Java-based environment for advanced teleteaching scenarios has been designed. The paper discusses its architecture and components and gives an outlook to future implementation and evaluation tasks.