A Multimedia Authoring and Virtual Collaboration System Supporting Multi-Conferences for E-Learning

Abstract

We are proposing the multimedia presentation authoring and virtual collaboration system that produces multimedia contents and enables multiple users who are dispersed in locally and timely to collaborate by the Internet. The proposed system consists of two parts—multimedia presentation authoring and recordable virtual collaboration tools. The authoring tool makes it possible to create and edit multimedia presentations that integrate diverse media types including images, video, sound, and texts for e-learning. Media objects are synchronized with the temporal and spatial information using SMIL defined by W3C. The collaboration tool categorizes users by the interested conference and any users can create new topics or join the existing topics by validating user’s access right freely in a conference they belong. Users can participate in more than one topic simultaneously, so they can inquire and get a valuable knowledge on-line in one topic and participate in the other topic more informed and intelligent. The produced multimedia presentation may be provided to the users through the conference before the discussion begins. Users can use text along with associated symbols such as arrows and polygons over the presented images during the discussion. Users’ opinions along with symbols are recorded to XML database.