Background

Since its inception, the NITOL project has considered all students as the target group, including those students already in place at teaching institutions and those who are fully employed. This makes for a flexible programme in which everybody can participate, letting them work where they want and when they want.

This is more or less old hat, and is what correspondence schools have been doing for ages. What is new, however, is that the teaching is based on state-of-the-art technology. To begin with we used the following technology:

We used the Windows applications Winix Post and Winix Konferanse for both of them.

When the NITOL project was first established, electronic mail and electronic conferences were the most commonly used services on the Internet.

Initially electronic mail and electronic conferences were services enabling users to exchange simple text messages, i.e. unformatted text. However, as these services developed, new features appeared - such as attachments linked to text messages. An attachment could be virtually anything, such as a spreadsheet file, an image, a drawing, a word-processing document. Thus we can electronically distribute formatted course lessons just as the traditional correspondence schools have been doing for a long time. The difference is that now we send course lessons in a matter of seconds, and they can be sent to all course participants in one simple operation.


Created by Geir Maribu, 16. November 1996