USING MOBILE AGENTS TO UPDATE AND MAINTAIN COURSE MATERIALS ON STUDENTS' COMPUTERS IN INTERNET-BASED DISTANCE EDUCATION

摘要

It is a general practice in Internet-based distance education to allow students to download a whole bunch of course materials to their own computers, so that they can study the course even if they are off line. In doing so we are facing a big challenge in keeping the course materials on students' machines consistent with that on the central server. In this paper we present a mobile agent-based solution to this practical problem in Internet-based distance education.