Distributed Multimedia Persistence Support for Educational Activities

摘要

Under most of the new technological-focusing learning approaches, one of the primal objectives is that of the incremental design and construction of an instructional environment more centered upon the learners' particular necessities and profiles. In such respect, multimedia tools and services have already been proposed and customized as the underpinnings to a broader range of more adequate educational and training software applications. In order to augment and extend this support over larger domains, there is now such a tendency to integrate these mechanisms with those obtained within the Distributed Systems arena. In this paper, a distributed multimedia persistence layer, which enables the seamless integration of multimedia databases with media-dedicated storage servers, is evaluated as such an underlying service bringing support to customary educational activities. With this purpose, some computational requirements commonly associated with the handling of learning materials are first presented, assessing their impact on the assisting middleware systems. Finally, three scenarios of study are investigated emphasizing the new service functionalities.