A Web-based Collaborative Enabled Multimedia Content Authoring

A Web-based Collaborative Enabled Multimedia Content Authoring and Management System for Interactive and Personalized Online Learning S.N. CHEONG H.S.KAM AZHAR K.M. M. HANMANDLU Multimedia University, Jalan Multimedia, 63100, Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia { sncheong, hskam, azhar.mustapha, madasu.hanmandlu }@mmu.edu.my http://www.mmu.edu.my

Abstract This paper describes the design and implementation of a web-based Collaborative enabled Multimedia Content Authoring and Management System (CMCAMS) for organizing, integrating and composing personalized and interactive course notes for online education. A 5-layered architecture is proposed for the CMCAMS and is implemented using the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). A Web-based distance education system has been developed over this framework to test its effectiveness. This system enables educators to manage personalized learning materials that are structured, profiled and streamed to students. It will examine the user’s profile to identify what level of difficulty to incorporate and what kind of presentation style to adopt based on the bandwidth available to students. The CMCAMS uses XML and XSLT techniques to generates SMIL documents, which form the backbone for educational online materials. The CMCAMS has several essential features: (1) Remote Access (2) Easy to use and (3) Support for Multi-Style.

1: Introduction In recent years, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and multimedia technology have increasingly altered the landscape of the educational field particularly in higher education. The revolution in the ICT arena has produced a new age of digitalism, which uses digital media as a way to learn and communicate with each other through a method known as online learning. The use of multimedia or multiple digital media elements in online education is becoming an emerging trend in the communication of educational information. Multimedia “provides a means to supplement a presenter’s efforts to garner attention, increase retention, improve comprehension, and to bring an audience into agreement” [1]. Nevertheless, streaming multimedia elements in an online learning environment across the Internet poses great challenges to academicians. First, the bandwidth

Proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE’02) 0-7695-1509-6/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE

availability to different students may vary tremendously. Students with a powerful Multimedia PC and a high bandwidth Internet connection will find multimedia an effective instructional medium for delivering information. On the other hand, students with a slow Internet connection will experience a lot of problems in accessing multimedia packed online educational materials. Student’s attention span is another main issue. For instance, a student who has had a previous course in Object Oriented Programming might want to skip the introductory concepts and jump straight into APIs, while a beginner would be better off going through the basics. Thus, the current trend of one-size-fits-all online education materials is inadequate. With the flexibility allowed to the digital form of media presentation, an online learning system should try to accommodate the needs of as many different students as possible through personalization. Most people would agree that such a personalization of educational online notes is desirable. Thus, in this paper we present a “Web-based Collaborative Multimedia Content Authoring and Management System (CMCAMS) for effective interactive and personalized material in online education” that provides a novel approach for organizing, integrating and composing personalized course notes for online education.

2: Design Issues and framework for CMCAMS Online learning materials, from a student’s viewpoint, can be treated as a sequence of webpages. A webpage, of course can contains multimedia elements, hyperlinks and animation. In our methodology, we address three issues that we consider central to producing a flexible and easy to use multimedia content management system: 1. Remote Access- It must provide an effective collaboration interface to academicians within an university or between universities in the content production process.

Easy to Use- It should be relatively straightforward to produce interactive and personalized educational online notes from the digital archive of educational materials. 3. Support for Multi-Style- There should exist a method for quickly producing multi-style educational online notes to meet the needs of different students. We deal with the first issue by developing a web application on top of the J2EE platform [5] that provides a robust scalable system to academic personnel to manage and deliver personalized education materials. It helps organize content from inception through deployment and eventually, to archiving and deletion of education online notes notwithstanding time and location challenges. Instructors from different universities can collaborate by contributing to our centralized database system via an Internet connection. At the same time, they can retrieve and filter content elements from the central database to compose online notes from wherever they are located. It is built using a multi-tier architecture that consists of the following layers: presentation layer, application logic layer, persistence layer, database layer and streaming platform. Regarding the second issue, educational resource elements are stored in a multimedia database. Individual educational element in the multimedia database is represented by an XML-based conceptual model that consists of different types of information such as subject name, object ID, metadata, date, hyperlinks, version and so on. Our approach treats each of them as a building block Extensive Markup Language (XML) that can be combined together to form a Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) document by using Extensive Markup Language (XSLT) techniques. SMIL is a language for describing interactive synchronized multimedia distributed on the Web [3, 4]. The personalized educational material (SMIL files) is logically divided into two sections: the layout section and the body section. Template designers will work on the layout section by specifying the type and position of content in the SMIL file. The academicians will focus on producing content for the body section without bothering about its presentation. The composition process is accomplished by putting together the edited content into pre-designed templates done by the layout designer and storing it back into the database for final review. Once the content item is completed, the coordinator will publish it to the web for the students. Presentation style that is personalized is achieved by using XSLT stylesheets that convert multiple XML documents into SMIL files by selecting, more or less automatically, the set of suitable presentations according to the student needs. Fig. 1 shows a sample of online multimedia educational material composed with a pre-defined layout using our CMCAMS. 2.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE’02) 0-7695-1509-6/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE

Concerning the third issue, we note that the system should accommodate students of different levels, interests, background and the availability of bandwidth. In our approach, we provide an easy way to generate multistyle content items with the same resource elements. This means that different users may encounter the same content with different multimedia design and level of detail. The deciding factors are based on the student profile. A Webbased educational application for distance education has been developed to test the effectiveness of the proposed CMCAMS framework.

Fig. 1: Sample page created by CMCAMS that arranges content based on a predefined layout chosen according to user needs.

3: Conclusion In this paper, we have presented the design of a 5-layered web application, built using J2EE i.e. a collaborative enabled multimedia content authoring and management system (CMCAMS). The framework has several novel features when compared to conventional approaches. These include a collaborative environment, a set of management tools for easy content authoring and user profiling and a method for quickly producing multistyle educational online notes to achieve personalization in online learning. The application can be remotely used by relevant personnel without any need of additional hardware or software. 4:

References:

[1] R. Lindstrom, The Business Week Guide to Multimedia Presentations: Create Dynamic Presentations That Inspire, New York: McGraw-Hill 1994, ch2, pp 33-46. [2] Lloyd Rutledge, SMIL 2.0 XML for Web Multimedia, IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING, Vol. 5, No. 5, 2001, pp.78-84. [3] Synchronized Multimedia, the World-Wide-Web Consortium, http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/ [4] Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition Developer’s Guide, Sun Microsystems Incs., http://java.sun.com/j2ee/j2sdkee/techdocs/guides/ejb/html/Dev GuideTOC.html