Lifelong learning is a vital component of the missions of the NMIS Project and MIT's Center for Advanced Educational Services (MIT/CAES). The importance of technical competence through the careers of engineers is of particular concern to MIT/CAES. Engineers and scientists attend colloquia and seminars to remain current, exchange technical information with fellow attendees or seek ideas for specific problems. Attendance allows interactive participation, an important component in cognitive processes related to the effective transfer of knowledge. Despite these benefits, schedule and travel constraints can limit attendance. Multimedia and network technologies will soon offer desktop participation in colloquia and seminars allowing virtual attendance, accelerating technology dissemination, enhancing technical skills, and increasing engineering and scientific productivity. A national network with an infrastructure capable of carrying high quality interactive multimedia services would provide significant benefits to America.

Accomplishments

MIT/CAES experimented with creating a series of prototype multimedia information services representing a variety of educational models for providing continuing education services to science and technology professionals.

Since the beginning of the NMIS project, delivering live video on the MBONE was relatively straightforward. On a number of occasions, this stable technology was used for distributing both MIT/CAES and NMIS events. Two examples of events that were broadcast include:

* Internet Economics Workshop, March 1995

* Vanevar Bush Symposium, October 1995

Simultaneously digitizing and indexing live video presentations from broadcasts on the MBONE and making them accessible nationwide on the Internet was considered a more complex challenge. This capability was demonstrated by simultaneously broadcasting and digitizing a live hour long broadcast on the MBONE of Jeff Schiller's Presentation on "Secure System Administration of MITNet" in February of 1995 and making it available on the World Wide Web (WWW).

A simple demonstration of delivering interactive multimedia over the Internet was created by using a simple tutorial "Introduction to Machine Tools" The tutorial was an HTML document available on the WWW which contained graphics, hypertext links, and short video clips (about 30 seconds each). Later in the project, a sample course was designed to be a demonstration of the capabilities of a prototype WWW authoring environment for creating more interactive multimedia services. This sample course was developed at CAES using materials taken from the video course "A New American TQM: Revolutions in Management."

Near the end of the NMIS Project in November of 1996, CAES/MIT and CECI/MIT hosted the conference "Distance Learning, The Strategic Revolution in Professional Development and Employee Education" at MIT in Cambridge, MA. This conference was an opportunity for all of the NMIS participants and others to present prototype services, compare lessons learned, and explore future directions. (Tapes of this conference are available from CAES.)

Future Directions

As the NMIS project progressed, the MIT/CAES focus evolved across a number of models for services delivery. The current focus now also includes the use of synchronous learning for the facilitation of discussion and participation. More importantly, the extension of the MIT/CAES early efforts in delivering a variety of services using the network have led to the delineation of a compre- hensive suite of distance learning capabilities now being implemented by CAES and CECI at MIT.