Project of Multimedia Web Presentation SystemIn this project we propose the use of Web technologies for the design, presentation, and delivery of teaching/education material either synchroniously (in real-time) or asynchronously (courses on-demand) There are two major parts of this project. The first part is the design and implementation of a Multimedia Web Presentation System (MWPS), while the second part is the creation of educational contents, using the design and "workflow" concept to transfer raw teaching material (usually text file that the lectures keep) to high-quality and interactive material using multimedia web-based technologies.The Web-based technologies for electronic presentation offer the following advantages:
We take a system view of high-quality presentation using the "workflow"
concept. This concept recognizes the presentation process as a system
which involves interactions among a variety of individuals
including (but not necessarily limited to) presenters, researchers,
learners, advisors, and administrators, through a series
of workflows that primarily involve access, creation, tutoring,
and manipulation of the subject matter. These activities
become particularly intense and difficult to manage and synchronize
when one wishes to integrate them with research workflows that arise in
rapidly changing fields, such as multimedia, advanced networking, and
parallel computing. Understanding the presentation workflows is
the key to effective application of technology to the process. Only
when advanced computer technology is correctly mapped to the presentation
process through the workflow model, can its fundamental benefits begin
to approach full realization.
Our MWPS allows rapid capture of in-presentation content through audio and
video tracks, as well as "instant" posting of the captured material
on the network for both synchronous (live) and asynchronous (on-demand) use.
The "world" of MWPS consists of presentation "slides" and "lessons."
Slides are re-usable by the instructor or author of the presentation, and
can be mixed into a lesson with few key-strokes. Audio/video captured
during a presentation is automatically synchronized with the selection
of the "slides" made by the presenter at the time of presentation.
An important consideration for content creation of the educational
institutes is the proper organization of the material to be presented.
Proper organization should consider issues such as the integration of
contents around a common subject developed by multiple authors
(for re-use purpose), proper break of presentation flow to allow insertion
of activities on-the-fly, convenient random accesses, etc. MWPS
materials are organized into subject titles. Each title owns sets of
slides. A slide can be either a local HTML page, a URL, a scanned image,
or other multimedia forms. Contents in a title can be constructed out of any
slides that belong to the title, or any URLs belonging to anyone, in any
order and as many times as needed.
In general, multimedia information needs to be stored in an advance database.
Since audio, video and text/graphic data are typically stored on different
servers, the data-base has to be distributed. Advanced hands-on Web-based
systems should support course organization that is more oriented towards
support of learning objects and their meta representations. An efficient
search engine is needed to search for specific topics and keywords. One
additional piece of information that must be attached to lecturing objects
is the quality of service that they expect. All these issues will be
addressed in the design of MWPS, and in the content creation for educational
institutes using MWPS.
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