MINERVA adds immediacy and responsiveness to the internet as infrastructure for distance learning, perfectly complementing the globality and multi-media aspects of the internet.
Learning and Teaching are natural applications for client/server systems. MINERVA allows to add intelligent user interfaces as until now only known from high level expert systems to distance learning systems. Interactivity on the client side give the student freedom to play with ideas without wasting teacher time and network resources. Tight integration of static and executable teaching materials become reality.
Consider case studies in physics text books: with MINERVA the models become exectable, the student can play with "live" experiments. The hyperlinked space of the world wide web naturally invites further exploration by students into the "real world".