Design and implementation of a broadband multimedia TeleLearning system.

Abstract

The advance of the networking and the multimedia technologies are making possible a wide range of interactive applications and services to be built which may eventually change the way that people live. TeleLearning is one prospective area among them which has obtained lots of attentions from both the educators and the researchers. In this thesis we discuss a Multimedia Interactive TeleLearning System under development in the Multimedia Information Research Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. The system aims at providing a seamlessly integrated environment for TeleLearning using the latest telecommunication and multimedia information processing technologies. It provides a new type of learning service--Course On Demand, which makes learning more accessible, more flexible, and with more proper help. The system basically consists of a media production center, a courseware author site, a courseware database, a courseware user site, and an on-line facilitator site. All these components are distributed over an ATM network and work together to offer a multimedia interactive courseware service. An MHEG-based model is exploited as the system architecture to achieve the real-time, reusable information interchange through heterogeneous platforms. The system architecture, courseware-processing strategies, courseware authoring issues. as well as the implementation of the first prototype are presented in this thesis.