As academic use of the Internet has vastly increased over the last few years EPCC has continued to try to use it effectively for information dissemination and interactive methods of distance learning. In this talk the experiences and lessons learned from a wide variety of web-based education and training projects will be outlined. From 1995 all of EPCC's course material and technical reports have been made freely available over the web for self-tuition or academic purposes, both in postscript and HTML form. This material has been downloaded from sites all over the world, typically by those not able to attend an EPCC course for geographical or financial reasons. To make this rather passive material more interactive the EPCC Interactive Courseware package, EPIC, was developed.
EPIC enables users to do course exercises via a browser at the client end.
This automates certain tasks that would otherwise detract from the learning process, for example the user having to enter in complicated shell commands. The browser interacts with the user's local software environment providing a mechanism to initiate local applications by pressing buttons embedded within the HTML course pages. This allows users to concentrate on the essential concepts of the exercises rather than having to waste time worrying about system specifics. The original version of EPIC was implemented using Perl. Since then the package has been reworked and improved through the use of Java.