While distance learning via video conferencing has gained wide acceptance in many universities around the world, interactive laboratory classes at a distance remain a weak area in this arena, especially those that require live interaction among students and the instructor to achieve cognitive or psychomotor outcomes. This paper discusses changes made to a same-time-same-place (STSP) telecommunications laboratory that have allowed experiments to be offered in a same-time-different-place (STDP) manner. Some of the key lessons learned to date are also presented.

The dramatic increase in distance learning (DL) enrollments in higher education is likely to continue. However, research on DL, which includes psychomotor, cognitive, and affective skills, is virtually nonexistent. Indeed, DL for psychomotor skills has been viewed as impossible. Laboratory coursework, which we define as including the acquisition of psychomotor, cognitive, and affective skills, has become a limiting factor in the growth of DL. What is needed is a synergistic integration of technologies and human-computer interface (HCI) principles from computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), collaborative learning systems, and immersive presence technologies to enable achievement of psychomotor learning objectives. This paper defines the computer-supported collaborative learning requiring immersive presence (CSCLIP) research area, provides a theoretical foundation for CSCLIP, and develops an agenda for research in CSCLIP to establish a foundation for the study of this emerging area. It also briefly describes a CSCLIP-based telecommunications lab currently under development. CSCLIP is presented as a major research opportunity for information systems researchers interested in empirical research as well as technical development.

The Virtual Laboratory (VLab) is focused on providing same-time different-place group-interactions, allowing full real-time virtual-interaction of voice/video/data information of the Internet, communication systems, and multimedia equipment and facilities for vision disabled persons. The VLab interactive-monitor uses piezoelectric technology for graphical display and includes a novel braille markup language (BML) interface with the wireless application protocol (WAP) and the hyper-text mark-up language (HTML). The BML interface enables conversion of all types of existing web sites and facility/equipment control information to be displayed on the VLab interactive Braille monitor.

Today, standards-based quality of service mechanisms are not universally deployed across Internet service provider backbones. As a result, many carriers that are deploying VoIP networks are segregating voice traffic from the data and installing pure VoIP backbones in order to better guarantee high quality. Of particular interest is maintaining end-to-end delivery of the voice information within some time bounds. This paper examines sources of end-to-end delays associated with VoIP calls, discusses differences between fixed and variable rate coding, and illustrates how trading off packet size versus router delay can impact the number of voice calls supportable by the network.

A bit time estimator which uses adaptive filtering techniques is presented. The filter weights of an adaptive linear predictor are shown to provide a reliable estimate of the bit time T of a random binary square wave contaminated with additive white Gaussian noise, with little or no a priori information. The quality of this estimator is then evaluated via the least mean square algorithm, and a comparison is made between it and a more conventional estimator based on a zero crossing detector. This comparison shows that an adaptive estimator based on a linear predictor is generally superior