Study Of Modern Distance Education Based On Grid

Grid technology has become the current international hot spot and the front area of research. It was used originally in the high-performance scientific and engineering computing field , but with grid research continually becoming mature, its areas of application expands. Now its performance is embodied in four main application areas : First, the strong interactive collaboration;Second, the real-time use of remote resources;Third, large-scale calculations;Fourth, virtual reality. The grid is considered to be the third wave of technology after the Internet technology and Web technology.Modern distance education based on Internet brings more learning opportunities to students. It makes students study in anywhen and anywhere. However, there are also some drawbacks related to current modern distance education, such as the lack of extensive resource sharing, the development of learning resources repeating very seriously, students and teachers lacking effective collaboration, virtual reality technology not being widely used in the field of distance education, and so on. The emergence of grid brings us an opportunity to address these issues, although there is little research about grid's application in distance education. So it is necessary to do some research about it. And this is my aritle's origin . Thus the focus of this paper are to study how to build a grid environment for all levels, how to build the learning environment for sharing resources based on grid, how to build virtual learning communities based on grid, and grid modern trends in the development of distance education. This paper is divided into seven chapters:Chapter â…  mainly introduces the actuality and insufficiency of the modern distant education and points the grid technologies can help to solve these problems.Chapter â…¡ tells the grid architecture and the key technology. It firstly introduces two kinds of existing architecture: the Layered Grid Architecture (LGA) and the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). OGSA has been widely applied at present. Then gives the key technologies such as grid middleware technologies, XML and Web Services. Finally it introduces the level framework for grid applications, which includes three models: Calculation / Data Grid, Information Grid and Semantic / Knowledge Grid.Chapter â…¢ tells how to build Educational Grid and gives a desin plan aboutbuilding campus grid based ChinaGrid.Chapter IV is the core of the paper. On the base of analyzing the problems on learning resource sharing, it puts forward the three levels, named Metadata, Semantics and Ontology. Then it introduces three Mechanisms for learning resources found based grid environment. Finally it proposes solutions about the learning resource sharing environmental based on educational grid.In the chapter V, we discussed virtual learning community study based on grid environment, which includes the technical support for Collaborative Learning and Knowledge Management. Then it gives a grid project on campus virtual learning communities based on the design of campus grid.Chapter VI, in this thesis we analyze future trends in distance education from the four main grid applications, interaction, Collaboration, Sharing and Virtual. The ending is the summarization and expectation.