Integrated tools for on-line education

Massey University has, for some years now, been developing and using tools for the delivery of multimedia presentations on Web sites. The key issues have been the size of the Web site and the bandwidth requirements for downloading the multimedia, which are both very small. This work is being used for the delivery of extramural, multi-campus and even internal courses using Web browsers. These practical applications of our tools in real live courses have given us insight into the requirements for online delivery. This paper describes a project, called Tile (Technology-Integrated Learning Environments), which integrates a wide range of tools for managing, designing, authoring, delivering and monitoring online education. The aim of the project is to develop an open, extensible and easy-to-use system in which a number of different tools can be integrated, sharing data on the structure and content of a given unit of educational material.