Design of a Web-Based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture System for Distance Education

• Authors: Herng-Yow Chen;Gin-Yi Chen;Jen-Shin Hong
• Venue: ICMCS '99 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems - Volume 2
• Year: 1999

Currently, the WWW has created an open-environment for convenient delivering of the HTML pages and low-bandwidth video clips. Since the HTML pages can present static text and image in much higher resolution than that presented by a low bit-rate video clip, we believe that the optimal mode for a WWW-based distance lecture is to use (1) streaming video clips for the audio/video lecturing, and (2) dynamically loaded HTML pages to present the lecture notes navigation process. To this end, in this article, we have designed a "Live/On-Demand Synchronized AV/HTML Distance Lecture System" to synchronize the presentation of the streaming video lecture, the HTML-based lecture notes, and the HTML Navigation Events. We propose a "Web-based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture (WSML)" Framework to automate the recording of the media presentation events based on the SMIL specification. The WSML framework Consists of three major modules: (1) WSML Recorder-for recording the temporal information of the AV lecture and the HTML-based lecture notes navigation process. (2) WSML Event server- for receiving, multicasting and depositing WSML events. (3) WSML Browser- for presentation of the syncronized AV lecture and the HTML-based lecture notes navigation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, in this stage, we have applied the RealSystem to implement a prototype Synchronized AV/HTML Distance Lecture System using Java/Javascript. The prototype system demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed framework.