We used our original Interactive Remote Instruction (IRI) system to teach scores of university classes over the past five years at sites up to 300 km apart. While this system is a prototype, its use in real classes allows us to deal with crucial issues in distributed education instruction systems. We describe our motivation and vision for a reimplementation of IRI that supports synchronous and asynchronous distance education. This new version, called IRI-h (h for heterogeneous), is coded in

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... and executes on several different platforms. IRI-h extends IRI both to multiple platforms and heterogeneous network infrastructures, including delivery to home users. In this article we describe IRI-h's architectural experiences with the developing prototype, including preliminary performance evaluation, and also unresolved issues still to be addressed.