New mode of course delivery for Virtual Classroom

Internet technology has advanced very rapidly over the last few years and a new trend in educational development for learning and teaching has emerged. Virtual Classroom is an online learning and teaching environment that facilitates the collaboration and integration of discussion forums, chat rooms, quiz management, lecture notes and assignment repositories, subscription services, relevant web links, e‐mail distribution lists and desk top video‐conferencing into a conventional lecturer‐based system.This paper reviews two existing modes of course delivery in a typical virtual classroom environment, namely synchronous communication and asynchronous communication, and presents a hybrid mode of delivery named near synchronous that adds to the conventional asynchronous technology the expressiveness and rapid recall of context of a synchronous delivery.The paper discusses the Singapore ‐MITAllianc (SMA) distance learning project and the current implementation of a virtual classroom in Nanyang Technological University.