A systematic approach to design the network-based learning environment for home and office

An effective network-based learning environment provides synchronous and asynchronous education to learners who are physically, remote from or opt to telecommute to the base location of instruction. The environment provides content creation, user registration, course material storage, multiple delivery means, and end-user viewing tools. An intriguing aspect of the environment is how to model a lecture in terms of pre-, in-, and post-class information. We regard a lecture model collectively as an activity consisting of three elements: lecture materials, lecture presentation, and lecture interaction. We derive the synchronization specification for the media objects and define strong-weak networked hyperlink (SWNH) to represent the lecture structure and inter/intra media object reference in the distributed network environment. The specification and representation exhibit an object-oriented modular design. The presentation of the lecture embody both the event-driven and timeline-based presentation synchronization where the browsing and authoring tools developed earlier fit right into the learning environment, e.g. FLIPS and HQT by the authors, or are immediately available through other providers, e.g. Web browsers.