Approaching a low-cost solution for distance university courses * Maria Alberta Alberti, Daniele Marini, Davide Gadia Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione Università degli Studi di Milano Giulio Casella Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Informazione Università degli Studi di Milano Via Comelico 39, 20135 Milano maria.alberti@unimi.it, daniele.marini@unimi.it,gadia@dico.unimi.it, giulio.casella@unimi.it Abstract: We discuss a system to broadcast the live experience of university lectures and to archive it for further asynchronous use. At the time of lecture the broadcast is bi-directional, to guarantee interactions between local and remote classes: both rooms display the teacher’s educational material while the video of the teacher is projected in the remote class and the remote class in the teacher’s room. Questions can be risen by students in both settings. The project requires minimum overhead on a teacher and no post-production. We give teachers the freedom to use different sources of information to deliver their lectures (slides, video, audio, a white-board for quick sketches, applications running on a desktop). All these events are captured and compressed into two video streams that are accessed through an interface generated by SMIL. The lectures archive is integrated with other communication tools, such as e-mail, forum or collaborative web. Introduction The main goal of higher education is to provide knowledge, and then to provide know–how. As for knowledge, we mean the acquisition of basic principles, concepts and methodology of a given discipline; enough to allow average students to become enough self-confident to pursue further professional life following the evolution of the discipline and gifted students to become active in the innovation of the discipline. As for know–how we mean the ability of pragmatically apply principles and methods in specific application fields, i.e. the ability of transforming knowledge into practice. The unique characteristic of university education is not just that the knowledge inherent a discipline is transferred to student, but rather that faculty members contribute to its evolution by practicing scientific research on methodological, theoretical, practical, technical issues of the field. As a consequence, the university education is strictly correlated to university research, and often, during the final stage of their education, students take active part to scientific research carried on at their universities. Given this scenario, distance learning should smoothly integrate with traditional education, should improve the degree of student participation to the university life and cannot become a substitute of it. Overall distance learning cannot take the place of the complex and rich relationships that are established among students themselves and among students and faculty members. From this viewpoint distance learning is to be considered as an opportunity to improve and re-organize the teachers and students community. To organize, implement and offer distance learning products as information delivery platform, even very structured and well organized information, show the potential risk of impoverishment. The most relevant aspect we must preserve in higher education is the experience of learning, the learning praxis, which is the result of a continuous exchange of human relations, of common experiences and of knowledge sharing. We view the * This research was partially financially supported by MIUR, project FIRB Web Minds under contract RBNE01WEJT_005.