Journal of Interactive Technology and Smart Education Vol 4 Issue 4 November 2007 Volume 4 Issue 4 November 2007 Volume 4 Number 4 November 2007 SPECIAL ISSUE Papers from the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning (MTEL) Gerald Friedland, Lars Knipping and Nadine Ludwig Guest editorial Gerald Friedland, Lars Knipping and Nadine Ludwig 179 Vector graphics for web lectures: experiences with Adobe Flash 9 and SVG Markus Ketterl, Robert Mertens and Oliver Vornberger 182 Authoring multimedia learning material using open standards and free software Alberto González Téllez 192 E-learning activity-based material recommendation system Feng-jung Liu and Bai-jiun Shih 200 Educational presentation systems: a workflow-oriented survey and technical discussion Georg Turban 208 www.emeraldinsight.com/itse.htm Interactive Technology and Smart Education PROMOTING INNOVATION AND A HUMAN TOUCH Interactive Technology and Smart Education ISSN 1741-5659 ITSE_4-4_Cover.qxd 03/08/08 02:53 PM Page 1 contents Vol 4 No 4 November 2007 Interactive Technology and Smart Education PROMOTING INNOVATION AND A HUMAN TOUCH SPECIAL ISSUE Papers from the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning (MTEL) Gerald Friedland, Lars Knipping and Nadine Ludwig Guest editorial Gerald Friedland, Lars Knipping and Nadine Ludwig 179 Vector graphics for web lectures: experiences with Adobe Flash 9 and SVG Markus Ketterl, Robert Mertens and Oliver Vornberger 182 Authoring multimedia learning material using open standards and free software Alberto González Téllez 192 E-learning activity-based material recommendation system Feng-jung Liu and Bai-jiun Shih 200 Educational presentation systems: a workflow-oriented survey and technical discussion Georg Turban 208 VOL 4 NO 4 NOVEMBER 2007 177 Professor Alistair Sutcliffe, University of Manchester, UK Anne Adams, UCL Interaction Centre, UK Petek Askar, Hacettepe University, Turkey Ray Barker, British Educational Suppliers Association, UK Maria Bonito, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Marie-Michèle Boulet, Université Laval, Canada Sandra Cairncross, Napier University, UK Gayle J. Calverley, University of Manchester, UK John M. Carroll, Penn State University, USA Chaomei Chen, Drexel University, USA Sara de Freitas, Birkbeck University of London, UK Alan Dix, Lancaster University, UK Khalil Drira, LAAS-CNRS, France Bert Einsiedel, University of Alberta, Canada Xristine Faulkner, London South Bank University, UK Terence Fernando, University of Salford, UK Gerhard Fischer, University of Colorado, CO, USA Monika Fleischmann, Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication, Germany Giancarlo Fortino, University of Calabria, Italy Gerald Friedland, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Bernie Garrett, University of British Columbia, Canada Lisa Gjedde, Danish University of Education, Denmark Ugur Halici, Middle East Technical University, Turkey Lakhmi Jain, University of South Australia, Australia Joanna Jedrzejowicz, University of Gdansk, Poland Joaquim A. Jorge, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Athanasios Karoulis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Lars Knipping, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany John R. Lee, University of Edinburgh, UK Paul Leng, Liverpool University, UK Anthony Lilley, magiclantern, UK Zhengjie Liu, Dalian Maritime University, China Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, University of Geneva, Switzerland Terry Mayes, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK Toshio Okamoto, University of Electro-Communications, Japan Martin Owen, NESTA Futurelab, UK Vasile Palade, Oxford University, UK Roy Rada, University of Maryland, MD, USA Elaine M. Raybourn, Sandia National Laboratories, NM, USA Rhonda Riachi, Oxford Brookes University (ALT), UK Kerstin Röse, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany Joze Rugelj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Eileen Scanlon, Open University, UK Jane K. Seale, University of Southampton, UK Helen Sharp, Open University, UK Vivien Sieber, University of Oxford, UK David Sloan, University of Dundee, UK Andy Smith, University of Luton, UK Paul Strickland, Liverpool John Moores University, UK Josie Taylor, Open University, UK Malcolm J. Taylor, Liverpool University, UK Thierry Villemur, LAAS-CNRS, France Weigeng Wang, University of Manchester, UK Founder and Editor-in-Chief Editorial Advisory Board Honorary Advisory Editor Dr Claude Ghaoui School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, Byrom Street, Liverpool L3 3AF, UK. Email: c.ghaoui@LJMU.ac.uk Guest editorial Guest Editors: Gerald Friedland International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California, USA Lars Knipping Department of Mathematics, Berlin Institute of Technology, Berlin, Germany and Nadine Ludwig MuLF – Center for Multimedia in eLearning and eResearch, Berlin Institute of Technology, Berlin, Germany Interactive Technology and Smart Education (2007) 179–181 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited INTRODUCTION Ever since the advent of automatic computation devices, efforts have been made to answer the question of how to properly integrate them and take advantage of their capa- bilities in education. Educational multimedia systems promise to make learning easier, more convenient, and thus more effective. For example, classroom teaching enriched by vivid presentations promise to improve the motivation of the learner. Concepts may be given a perceivable exis- tence in a video show and the observability of important details can be stressed. Video capturing of lectures has become common practice to produce distance education content directly from the classroom. Simulations allow stu- dents to explore experiments which would be otherwise impossible to be conducted physically by students. Today, almost every university claims to have a strate- gy to utilize the opportunities provided by the Internet or digital media in order to improve and advance tradi- tional education. However, the question about how mul- timedia can really make education more exploratory and enjoyable is as yet not completely answered. In fact, we are just beginning to understand the real contribution of multimedia to education. For example, various web sites and lecture videos produced as part of the “e-learning hype” often do not exploit the full potential of multimedia for teaching. For example, how can we support participant interaction in classrooms and lecture halls better? What are the best tools for the development of educational mul- timedia material? How can we make the production of educational material easier and existing application more reusable? In addition, new technologies and trends – such as mobile and semantic computing – open up new and exciting opportunities for teaching with multimedia and the creation of multimedia learning material. How can these new trends in multimedia research be used to improve multimedia education or education in general? In order to find answers to these and many other ques- tions, we organized the second IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning (MTEL) in connection with the 9th IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia. Based on the success of the first MTEL workshop in 2006, our goal was to attract researchers and educators from the multimedia commu- nity as well as researchers from other fields, such as semantic computing and HCI, who are working on issues that could help improve multimedia education as well as teaching and learning in general. Based on dis- cussion among these experts with different backgrounds, the workshop’s aimed to identify new trends and high- light future directions for multimedia-based teaching. VOL 4 NO 4 NOVEMBER 2007 179 180 INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION The following special issue of Interactive Technology Smart Education presents four papers that have been carefully selected by the program committee for publica- tion in this journal. They have been extended by the authors according to reviewers suggestions. We hope that these articles are able to inspire even more creativity in the overlap between human-centered and technology- centered research. The following paragraphs provide a short overview of the selected articles. Vector Graphics for Web Lectures: Experiences with Adobe Flash 9 and SVG, presents experiences made during the development and every day use of two versions of the lec- ture recording system virtPresenter. The first of these versions is based on SVG while the second one is based on Adobe Flex2 (Flash 9) technology. The authors point out the advantages vector graphics can bring for web lectures and briefly present a hypermedia navigation interface for web lectures that is based on SVG. Also, they compare the formats Flash and SVG and conclude with describing changes in workflows for administrators and users that have become possible with Flash. Authoring Multimedia Learning Material using Open Standards and Free Software deals with avoiding drawbacks like license cost and software company dependencies at distributing interactive multimedia learning materials. The authors propose using open data standards and free software as an alternative without these inconveniences. But available authoring tools are commonly less produc- tive. The proposal is based on SMIL as composition lan- guage particularly the reuse and customization of SMIL templates used by INRIA on their technical presenta- tions. The authors also propose a set of free tools to pro- duce presentation content and design focusing on RealPlayer as delivery client. E-Learning Activity-based Material Recommendation System an application to utilize the techniques of LDAP and JAXB to reduce the load of search engines and the complexity of content parsing is described. Additionally, through analyzing the logs of learners’ learning behav- iors, the likely keywords and the association among the learning course contents will be conducted or figured out. In conclusion, the integration of metadata of the learning materials in different platforms and mainte- nance in the LDAP server specified. Finally, Educational Presentation Systems: a workflow- oriented survey and technical discussion presents an overview of processes before, during and after an educational presenta- tion. The different processes are presented in form of a workflow. The workflow is also used in order to present, analyze and discuss different systems including their individual tools covering the different phases of the workflow. After this overview of systems, the different approaches are discussed in respect to the workflow. This discussion provides specific technical details and differ- ences of the focused systems. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Guest Editors wish to thank Claude Ghaoui, ITSE Editor-in-Chief, and then dedicated reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful work. They were: Abdallah Al-Zoubi, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Jordan Michael E. Auer, Carinthia Tech Institute, Austria Helmar Burkhart, University of Basel, Switzerland Paul Dickson, University of Massachusetts, USA Berna Erol, Ricoh California Research Center, USA Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh, USA Claude Ghaoui, Liverpool John Moores University, UK Wolfgang Hürst, University of Freiburg, Germany Sabina Jeschke, University of Stuttgart, Germany Ulrich Kortenkamp, Paedagogische Hochschule Gmuend, Germany Ying Li, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA Marcus Liwicki, University of Bern, Switzerland Robert Mertens, University of Osnabrück, Germany Jean-Claude Moissinac, ENST Paris, France Thomas Richter, University of Stuttgart, Germany Anna Marina Scapolla, University of Genova, Italy Georg Turban, Darmstadt Institute of Technology, Germany Nick Weaver, ICSI Berkeley, USA Debora Weber-Wulff, FHTW Berlin, Germany Marc Wilke, University of Stuttgart, Germany Peter Ziewer, Munich Institute of Technology, Germany We would like to thank all authors for their quick revision and extension of the articles presented herein. Their commitment made it, again, possible to release this special issue so quickly after the workshop. REFERENCE Friedland, G., Knipping, L., and Ludwig N. (2007), “Second IEEE International Workshop in Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning”, Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, IEEE Computer Society, Taichung, Taiwan, pp. 343–95. ABOUT THE GUEST EDITORS Dr Gerald Friedland is currently a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. Prior to that, he was a member of the multi- media group of the computer science department of Freie Universität Berlin. His work concentrates on intelligent multimedia technology with a focus on methods that help people to easily create, edit, and navigate content, aiming at creating solutions that “do what the user means”. He is program co-chair of the 10th IEEE Guest editorial Guest editorial VOL 4 NO 4 NOVEMBER 2007 181 Symposium on Multimedia and the Second IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing. In addition to the second IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-learning, he also co- chaired the first ACM Workshop on Educational Multimedia and Multimedia Education. He has received several international research and industry awards. Among them is the European Academic Software Award in 2002, for the creation of the E-Chalk system in coop- eration with Lars Knipping. He is also member of the editorial advisory board of ITSE. Dr Lars Knipping is a researcher at the mathematics department at Technische Universität Berlin. He belongs to the board of editors of ITSE and the editorial team of iJET (International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning). Before joining Technische Universität he worked as a scientific consultant in a research project for a state-funded TV broadcaster, the “Sender Freies Berlin”, followed by positions as researcher and instructor at the multimedia group at the computer science department of Freie Universität Berlin and as lecturer in International Media and Computing at the FHTW Berlin. Dr. Knipping received his Ph.D. degree for his work on the E-Chalk system and holds M.Sc. degrees in both mathematics and computer science. Nadine Ludwig graduated from Technische Universität Ilmenau with a degree in Computer Science in 2005. In her thesis she described the integration of remote labora- tories in Learning Content Management Systems via SCORM. Since May 2006 Ms Ludwig has been a part of the MuLF Center at Technische Universität Berlin as a research associate. Currently she is working on her PhD-thesis in the field of Semantics and Modularization of Learning Objects in Cooperative Knowledge Spaces. Vector graphics for web lectures: experiences with Adobe Flash 9 and SVG Markus Ketterl Virtual Teaching Support Center, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany Email: mketterl@uni-osnabrueck.de Robert Mertens Fraunhofer IAIS, Schloß Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, Germany Email: robert.mertens@iais.fraunhofer.de and Oliver Vornberger Department of Computer Science, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany Email: oliver@uni-osnabrueck.de Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to is to describe vector graphics for web lectures, focusing on the experiences with Adobe Flash 9 and SVG. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents experiences made during the development and everyday use of two versions of the lecture-recording system virtPresenter. The first of these versions is based on SVG, while the second is based on Adobe Flex2 (Flash 9) technology. The paper points out the advantages vector graphics can bring for web lectures and briefly presents a hypermedia navigation interface for web lectures that is based on SVG. The paper also compares the formats Flash and SVG and concludes with describing changes in workflows for administra- tors and users that have become possible with Flash. Findings – Vector graphics are an ideal content format for slide-based lecture recordings. File sizes can be kept small and graphics can be displayed in superior quality. Information about text and slide objects is stored symbolically, which allows texts to be searched and objects on slides to be used interactively, for example, for navigation purposes. The use of vector graphics for web lectures is, however, a trend that has begun only recently. A major reason for this is that multiple media formats have to be combined in order to replay video and slides. Originality/value – The paper offers in insight into vector graphics as an ideal content format for slide-based lecture recordings. Keywords: Lectures, Worldwide web, Graphical user interfaces, Presentation graphics, Multimedia, Teaching aids Paper type: Research paper Interactive Technology and Smart Education (2007) 182–191 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1. INTRODUCTION Vector based graphics formats offer a number of possi- bilities for the realization of web lecture interfaces for slide based talks. One major advantage is that they support capturing contents in a symbolic manner which is a requirement for searching text in a recording (Lauer and Ottmann, 2002). They also offer superior picture 182 INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Ketterl, Mertens and Vornberger: Vector graphics for web lectures VOL 4 NO 4 NOVEMBER 2007 183 quality. Last but not least, vector based graphics formats enable developers to realize a high degree of interactivity that can be used for implementing advanced navigation concepts as described in (Mertens et al. 2006d). They also can be used to tackle a number of layout problems as fur- ther described in (Mertens et al. 2006b). Vector graphics are, however, not very common in web lectures. This article presents the authors’ experience with two different vector graphics formats: (scalable vector graphics SVG ) and Adobe’s new Flex 2 (Flash 9 based) technology for content presentation and control in the web lecture system virtPresenter. The SVG based version of the lecture recording system has been used at the University of Osnabrück and at the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück since summer 2003. During this time, users with different backgrounds, knowledge and expectations experienced the system in every day use. The Adobe Flex 2 based counterpart has been introduced in February 2007 after a seven month develop- ment and testing period. This new version is, apart from small changes concerning further system requirements and improvements, in productive use since March 2007. The article is organized as follows: Section 2 points out the advantages vector graphics can bring for web lectures and briefly presents a hypermedia navigation interface for web lectures that is based on SVG. Section 3 describes experiences with this SVG based interface and points out difficulties that arose during the use of this interface in a number of university courses. Section 4 compares Flash and SVG with respect to their use in lecture recording. Section 5 introduces the Flash based successor of the SVG based interface. Section 6 describes changes in work- flows for administrators and users that have become possi- ble with Flash. Section 7 briefly summarizes the work pre- sented in this article and refers to future projects and ideas. 2. ADVANTAGES OF VECTOR GRAPHICS IN WEB LECTURES The advantages of using vector graphics for content rep- resentation in web lectures can be summarized in a couple of words: vector graphics store content in a symbolic way, vector graphics can be enlarged without loss of quality and many vector graphics formats allow for interactive on- the-fly manipulation of contents. The aim of this section is to show why these properties of vector graphics are use- ful by showing how each of them improves web lectures. 2.1 Symbolic Representation of Contents and Interactivity The original virtPresenter user interface shown in Figure 1 was developed to implement a hypermedia navigation concept for lecture recordings (Mertens, 2007). Hypermedia navigation consists of the five ele- ments full text search, bookmarks, backtracking, struc- tural elements and footprints (Bieber, 2000). Full text search is realized by searching the text of the slides in the slide overview. Search results are highlight- ed by an animation that grows and shrinks them repeat- edly. Both the ability to search in the slides directly and to animate search results is based on the properties of SVG (symbolic representation and manipulation on the fly). Bookmarks are realized as a functionality that allows for selecting arbitrary passages and storing them for later viewing or exchanging them with other students. Backtracking is implemented by storing the play position whenever the user navigates to another play position. Thus each navigation action can be undone. In order to facilitate orientation at the stored play positions, replay begins at their time index minus three seconds. Structural elements are realized in two ways the simple one of which are next/previous buttons that allow navigating to the next or previous slide or animation step. A more sophisticate realization of struc- tural elements is the interactive slide overview imple- mented in virtPresenter (Mertens et al., 2006c). In the overview, those parts of a slide that had been animated during the original presentation when the lecture was recorded can be clicked on with the mouse. The record- ing then starts replay at the time index when the respec- tive animation takes place during the lecture. To realize these features, the slide documents are analyzed and script code containing the respective time indices is added automatically to the animated elements of a slide (Mertens et al., 2007). The implementation of this step was relatively easy due to the symbolic representation of the slide elements in SVG. Footprints serve the purpose of showing users which parts of a hyperdocument they have already visited. In classic hypertext, this is done by colouring visited and non-visited links differently. Since web lectures are time based media, another approach had to be found. In virtPresenter, coloured parts of the timeline indicate that the corresponding passages of the recording have already been watched by the user. Multiple visits are indicated by deeper shad- ings. The footprints are stored symbolically as pairs of start and end time indices. They are drawn on the fly when a lecture is watched. This has been realized by the use of animated SVG rectangles. The different colour shadings are created by overlapping semitransparent rectangles. This brief description shows that the properties of SVG as a vector graphics format have been crucial for the realization of the virtPresenter user interface. Especially the implementation of footprints, bookmarks and full text search has been facilitated immensely by SVG as a vector graphics format. 184 INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Ketterl, Mertens and Vornberger: Vector graphics for web lectures 2.2 Superior Picture Quality Good picture quality of lecture slides is important even for standard usage scenarios (Ziewer and Seidl, 2002). However, it becomes even more important, when the lec- ture slides are shown on a large screen as in the scenario depicted schematically in Figure 2. In this scenario, the lecture is replaced by a cinema- like session in which the recording of the lecturer and the slides are presented to the audience on two large screens. This scenario has been carried out successfully at the University of Osnabrück a number of times (Mertens et al., 2005). Since the slides are shown on a large screen, bad picture quality becomes even more obvious than dur- ing replay on a standard computer display. At the University of Osnabrück, the slides used had been in SVG and had thus been presented in the same quality as in the original lecture. 3. LESSONS LEARNED The SVG-based version of the viewer interface was first developed in 2003 and improved in various steps. The main focus of the development was to implement the hypermedia navigation concept for lecture recordings described in section 2 and in more detail in (Mertens et al., 2004). At the time when development of the SVG based ver- sion began, SVG seemed to be a promising choice for a content format to be used in lecture recordings. SVG is an XML based vector graphics format and was expected to grow in importance. We had expected that SVG ren- derers supporting the required subset of the SVG stan- dard would soon become available on more platforms than Windows and that their performance would increase in order to rival that of Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash). Things have, however, developed in a different direction. While all the features described in (Mertens et al., 2004) could be realized with a combination of JavaScript, SVG and Real Video, the technology used lead to a num- ber of problems in every-day use. Loading and rendering speed has shown to be a major problem when combining SVG and Real technology. Table 1 compares slide load- ing times of the SVG and the Flash based implementa- tion (further described in sections 4 and 5). It also shows loading times for an optimized version of the SVG slides in which background graphics in the slides (logos) had been deleted to speed up rendering. The testing environ- ment was a Windows XP system with an AMD Athlon 64 based processor with 2,01 GHz and 1 GB RAM. The tests were made locally on that system without internet connection interferences. This test indicates the elapsed time till a slide object is loaded and fully available in the main application. As some interactivity and animation features of SVG that are only supported in the Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV) had been used in the interface, replay was only possible with the ASV for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). This viewer plug-in does, however, exhibit low rendering speeds and support will be discontinued in January 2008. This fact is especially problematic when many slides have to be shown at once as it is the case for overviews. Also switching from one slide to another happens with a noticeable delay. The Real video player buffers data when users navigate in the video. This buffering also slows down the interfaces responding times noticeably. Another problem with SVG was that the plug-in required only exists for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Even though Adobe had implemented plug-in-versions for other browsers, only the one for IE supports the subset of the SVG specification required for the implementa- tion. This fact rules out platform independence for the Figure 1 VirtPresenter 1.0 user interface Ketterl, Mertens and Vornberger: Vector graphics for web lectures VOL 4 NO 4 NOVEMBER 2007 185 interface. Last but not least, the fact that plug-ins are required for both Real Video and SVG poses an obstacle for first time users of the interface. The use of the SVG-based interface has been evaluated in a number of courses. In these evaluations, the above mentioned points have shown to have a considerable neg- ative impact on user acceptance. In 2006, three courses have been evaluated with a questionnaire developed for the evaluation of e-Learning at the University of Osnabrück. For abbreviation purposes, these courses are referred to in the paper as courses A, B and C. Table 2 summarizes relevant details on the courses. Figure 3 shows how the students judged download times of the recordings. No actual download was offered. The term “download times” does thus refer to loading and rendering times of the viewer interface. By and large the numbers in the figure do not seem too critical at first sight. In practice, however, the interface loads consider- ably longer than other material found on the course web site. Also, the results show that while the loading times have been acceptable for most students, they have not been acceptable for all students. Figure 4 shows how many students reported problems using virtPresenter. The problem descriptions were entered as free text answers in the questionnaires. In course A, no student reported a problem. This might be due to the fact that students were given very detailed instructions. Having a non-technical background, the students have very likely followed these instructions closely. The questionnaires have also shown that all stu- dents in course A used IE. In the other courses, the ques- tionnaires have shown that some students did not use IE (even though they had been instructed that using another web browser would cause problems with the interface). In contrast to course A, course B and C had been attended by a number of students with technical backgrounds. The questionnaires lead to the assumptions that some of these students, being used to solve problems by trial and error, have tried to use the interface with other browsers than IE unregarding the information that it would not work on these browsers. Seemingly unaware of the fact that the interface was not supported under these settings, the stu- dents reported the system behaviour as faults. From one problem description it even became clear, that the stu- dent had not installed any SVG viewer. In order to counter the above described effects, a num- ber of improvements had been devised for the SVG based version of the interface. For example, a nearly equivalent solution with QuickTime video instead of Real video that also works with SVG for the slide representation and a Flash 6 based thumbnail overview component for faster slide loading and interface responding. This approach of mixing technology did not solve the problems either. The reason was that the users had to install another plug-in, QuickTime instead of Real as well as the Flash plug-in. Table 1 Slide loading with SVG and Flash Technology SVG SVG optimized Flash average slide 164* 120* 67 loading time (ms) 430** 243** 81 average slide loading time 1 video (ms) (Real video) (Real video) (Flash video) average slide size (KB) 54 25 28 13 different converted PowerPoint slides System: Windows XP AMD Athlon 64 Processor; *outlier here: 520, 635 2,01 GHz, 1GB Ram **outlier here: 7300, 6349, 2280, 4300 Figure 2 Lecture slides on large screens [...]... systems and provides a common vocabulary for communicating between different persons such as users and developers and eases the classification and understanding of presentation systems for both INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Turban: Educational presentation systems The workflow, systems and table including their description are used for a discussion that involves different systems and stages... Java applet technology We have observed that students like multimedia material as a complementary resource on presential classes and Figure 6 Realplayer launced from the applet located in PoliformaT 198 INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Téllez: Authoring multimedia learning material using open standards and free software as self learning material it is much more helpful than static and silent... TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Liu and Shih: E-learning activity-based material computers can replace human labor to efficiently process the tedious algorithm, but maintain high-level humanistic and professional analysis Teachers can apply it on the teaching websites, and let the system compile thematic materials for them, saving time of copying and pasting, coding, and rewriting It is customizable and interactive. .. Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE), Auckland, New Zealand, December 2002, Vol 2, pp.749-58 191 Interactive Technology and Smart Education (2007) 192–199 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited Authoring multimedia learning material using open standards and free software Alberto González Téllez Departamento de Informática de Sistemas y... December 2006, pp 933-7 Mertens, R., Ketterl, M and Vornberger, O, (2007), “The virtPresenter lecture recording system: automated production of web lectures with interactive content overviews”, International Journal of Interactive Technology and Smart Education (ITSE), Vol 4 No 1, pp 55-66 Mertens, R., Brusilovsky, P., Ishchenko, S and Vornberger, O (2006d), “Time and structure based navigation in web lectures:... prospect, do not lose a feasible method either INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Liu and Shih: E-learning activity-based material 3 SYSTEM DESIGN The system is divided into 4 parts: collecting indexing data, inquiring services, association rule and collaborative filtering As shown in Figure 1, it explains the relation between users and the system and the processing flow of usage data In the... started from other INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Ketterl, Mertens and Vornberger: Vector graphics for web lectures programmes A Problem with Adobe Presenter is constituted by the fact that this component exports only Flash 6 slides in the current version The communication between old Flash objects and new Flash 9 objects is not ideal at the moment Difficult is for example the handling of different... the common standard, users still have to visit individual platforms to gain INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Liu and Shih: E-learning activity-based material appropriate course materials contents It is comparatively inconvenient 2 High redundancy of learning material Due to difficulty of resource-sharing, it is hard for instructors to figure out the redundancy of course materials and therefore... use Adobe’s expensive Flash Media Server 2 solution in our production environment INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Ketterl, Mertens and Vornberger: Vector graphics for web lectures 6 BEHIND THE SCENES: ADMINISTRATION AND WORKFLOWS Lecture recording with virtPresenter makes use of a fully automated recording and an extended production chain described in (Ketterl et al., 2007a) While this process... voice, and the delivery of recorded content to Java aware web clients Common presentations authored with office suites tools are intended to be used locally in the computer were they are stored Web format is supported as an export option but usually the format obtained is not well INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Téllez: Authoring multimedia learning material using open standards and free . multimedia-based teaching. VOL 4 NO 4 NOVEMBER 2007 179 180 INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION The following special issue of Interactive Technology Smart Education presents four papers that have been carefully. Smart Education PROMOTING INNOVATION AND A HUMAN TOUCH Interactive Technology and Smart Education ISSN 1741-5659 ITSE_4-4_Cover.qxd 03/08/08 02:53 PM Page 1 contents Vol 4 No 4 November 2007 Interactive Technology and Smart Education PROMOTING. lectures and it has shown that this tech- nology can be used to improve usability and ease the administrative workload. 190 INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SMART EDUCATION Ketterl, Mertens and Vornberger: