SoftBoard: A Web-based application sharing system for distance learning

The thesis describes the development of SoftBoard, a Web-based application sharing system. The main goal is to create a convenient tool for conducting virtual office hours for distance education over the Internet. It has been reported in the recent research papers that the current Internet is still not suitable for supporting collaborative tools such as audio/video conferencing and some advanced application sharing features as proclaimed by developers. However the Internet can be used to a lesser degree to fulfill needs of smaller application sharing systems which are not very network bandwidth intensive. SoftBoard is designed to be used over today's Internet, and can be easily invoked from a standard Web browser. It is developed in Java and is implemented using Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) for networking. A light pen can be used with SoftBoard to provide a convenient way for creating non-textual contents free hand. The thesis is part of the ongoing research work at Florida Atlantic University's Center for Innovative Distance Education Technologies (CIDET). Research work has been done to validate the present Internet for its capabilities to hold a true distance education program using various available collaborative tools.