Networking for Instructional Computing


Because our students use computer lessons as a required part of their courses it is essential to have a way to track individual student use. This is done by having all of the machines which the students use networked to a server which stores a common data base of names, courses, and lessons. Because of the large amount of data required to support full motion video the network has been configured for high effective bandwidth to individual stations.

Some important factors in the design of a network which supports multimedia based instructional computing are the networking hardware, the server and network operating system.

By choosing networking components carefully we have built a local area network for chemistry that is capable of delivering lessons with full motion video to over 100 computers. Even highly compressed video files are quite large and their delivery from the server to the student's computer requires a large amount of bandwidth. It would have been easy to have made a mistake in the selection of network components so that delivery of video was so slow as to make its use on a large scale impractical. If possible, it is desirable for chemists responsible for implementing the use of computers to teach chemistry to understand the the basics of networking for instruction.

Figure 11

Figure 11, 10BASE T Ethernet connection on back of PC.

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