A Support System for Multimedia Management in Teleteaching Scenarios

摘要

As a result of the research work done a sophisticated technical environment for distance education is at hand. Discussions with involved students revealed that best quality is very important for video streams and even more important for audio streams. Shortages in this field lead to dropping motivation and decreasing acceptance. One overall result coming from the survey is that teleteaching/telelearning applications are highly accepted. Particular attention is paid to network technologies which enable the demanding multimedia-oriented applications. While upgrading the German Broadband Scientific Thus, the underlying hardware in the system structure is controlled in different ways. On the one hand you have to trigger ATM codecs, on the other hand devices with serial interfaces have to be operated. In this context it is also possible to use infrared remote controls for hardware control. The direct integration of JINI-devices is one possibility. The service layer between JINI and the hardware enables to embed device interfaces in JINI-services. The service layer creates additional service objects which read the device parameters for the JINI service. The interface of the media control with the underlying system occurs with the JINI-technology. The graphical user interface of the media control tool is programmed in JAVA with well-defined interfaces to JINI. The media control tool provides the lecturer with a summary of all available electronic devices in the media pool. Besides online control the media control tool also offers standard configurations which are pre-configured for particular teleteaching scenarios. The lecturer has the opportunity to configure a media selection for the presentation on the graphical user interface. The connection will then be made automatically by the system. Figure 4 shows the graphical user interface of the media control tool. The media-control-tool provides comfortable usage of available electronic devices without knowledge of location, configuration or even performance of the devices. This is an helpful add-on for the lecturer during the presentation and gives the possibility for a comfortable, effective, and high-quality service. Network with additional ATM based services more high quality scenarios are being tested. For teachers the handling of the technical equipment and the coordination of multiple multimedia devices is demanding. Given the necessary bandwidth the quality of multimedia based teleteaching is highly influenced by user-friendly applications, i. e. the comfortable use of available electronic devices with advanced multimedia presentation material. The multimedia control system integrated in a teleteaching terminal as depicted in fig. 3 shows one feasible approach to support the teacher in a sophisticated way.