Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A very powerful capability of the virtual university would be a sophisticated
curriculum planning engine. Potential students could identify their career choices
or preferred occupations, and an intelligent curriculum engine would generate a
full list of all courses needed to support their choices.
Not only would courses be identified, but also the current books and journals,
professional associations, forms of certification and licensing that might be
needed, and many other attributes for major occupations such as software engin-
eering, project management, software quality assurance, database analyst, and per-
haps 150 more knowledge-based occupation groups would be identified as well.
Every university needs a good library, and the library for the virtual university
would be world-class. It would have features not offered in normal libraries. For
example, suppose a student is interested in the topic of software testing. Not only
would the library have abstracts of every published book and article on testing, but
it would constantly be refreshed by means of intelligent agents that would scan the
web for new materials.
Of course, for many topics, the number of books and reference items might be
in the millions, so the library would also include tools for narrowing searches and
for assigning relevance scores.
Because the virtual university might be accessed by students from several hun-
dred countries, there would also be real-time translation services among all ma-
jor natural languages. Thus, courses might be simultaneously available in English,
Russian, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, and es-
sentially every human language.
Ideally, the translation services would encompass both text materials and per-
haps even spoken discussions among students and faculty. A sophisticated virtual
university would no doubt license language translation tools plus perhaps voice-
to-text tools such as Dragon.
A virtual university would want to offer world-class facilities for those who
might have physical limits. For example, to aid the deaf and hard of hearing, all
spoken material could be simultaneously translated into printed text. All video
and instructional films would automatically include closed captions or subtitles.
This technology is available today. It would also be possible to offer simultaneous
translations of spoken courses into sign language. However, translation of printed
materials into sign language may not yet be fully available.
For the blind, all printed materials could be translated into audio files. This
technology also exists today. It might even be possible to support simultaneous
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