Trans-European Tele-Education Network
The Trans-European Tele-Education Network is a project, funded by the Education and Training sector of the Community's Telematics Applications specific RTD programme, which aims to develop a "virtual distributed classroom". The project, based on ETSIT which has previously been successfully demonstrated in Spain, aims to create a demonstrator covering at least six European countries through a trunk network. It is hoped that this could eventually lead to the creation of national tele-education networks with a fully transnational capability. The Tele-Education Network project will last for two years (from January 1996), by the end of which it is expected that a complete demonstrator will have been built and evaluated from both technical and pedagogical standpoints. The project has been designed around a life-cycle model, and started with a user needs analysis. On the basis of this, the objectives are to be expanded in two directions: firstly the transnational potential and secondly, other possible applications such as university campuses and SME sites. The final demonstrator pilot, will be built using a quality procedure which will attempt to obtain a potential commercial product using European technology and European standards. The technology used in the project is the CODE (Cooperative Data Exchange) network, developed by the European Space Agency. This uses VSAT (very small aperture terminal) satellite stations to interconnect different local area networks (LANs) at remote sites. The system can run on standard PCs and will support a training strategy integrating voice, video and data.