Motivation for MTEACH comes from the desire to create a complete and functional set of software applications which would support remote lecturing over a campus-wide computer network. Several issues need to be considered - the need for an information system which would enable users to access all the necessary information regarding a lecture (such as time, network address, and the necessary set of multimedia tools), con-servation of network bandwidth, low cost and the implementation of "floor control." What is meant by floor control is session moderation, i.e. enabling and disabling partici-pant's transmissions and preventing unauthorized malicious transmissions. A highly configurable distributed client-server system (similar to a program guide, or course schedule) for facilitation of management, scheduling, announcement and activa-tion of various real time and stored multimedia events is developed. This system is known as MTEACH. Basic user administration such as adding, modifying, deleting and changing user privileges is also possible. Two existing video and audio conferencing ap-plications have been altered in order to implement the floor control and question asking mechanisms.

Since the underlying network protocol uses multicast addressing scheme, necessary network bandwidth is minimized. Even though MTEACH works best in a controlled network environment such as a campus network, it can be used on a wider scale provided that all of the network routers support multicast routing. If not, MTEACH can still work if the lack of multicast is augmented by the use of MBONE (Multicast backBONE) tech-niques.

Test results have shown that MTEACH achieved its purpose. Information about lec-tures can be accessed and changed easily. The implementation of the floor control mechanism along with "question taking" have successfully been implemented without significant network loading. By avoiding the use of dedicated hardware as much as pos-sible, system cost is retained at a minimum.