Capturing essential questions using question support facilities in the VIEW classroom

The paper describes a concept and facilities of the VIEW Classroom, a distance education system supporting interactions between a teacher and students. In a classroom a basic interaction between them is performed by questions and answers. In distributed education systems such an one-to-many interaction frequently implies difficulties in selecting by a teacher essential questions, and causes overload of a teacher and delays in the answering. The VIEW Classroom System provides a facility for the teacher to specify key phrases associated with locations of the teaching material. These phrases can be referred by students in their questions. A teacher can select essential students1 problems from a list of questions ordered either by the predefined priority or by the frequency of questions. To avoid delays in answering questions the system provides a question support facility which makes possible to answer some questions automatically, by reusing previous answers to similar questions. The VIEW Classroom System provides a question accumulation mechanism and a graphical user interface.