Oliver BrdiczkaScientific Researcher at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Before joining PARC, he managed a research group on Ambient Collaborative Learning at Telecooperation Group at TU Darmstadt, Germany and before that held a lecturer position at Université Pierre Mendès France (UPMF), Grenoble. He has authored and co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of activity recognition, context modeling, machine learning, human-computer interaction and e-learning, and serves on numerous program committees for international conferences. Oliver Brdiczka holds a PhD degree in Computer Science, and MS degree in Imagery, Vision and Robotics from Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble as well as a diploma degree in Computer Science from Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany.

Lars KnippingProfessor and Managing Director of MuLF (Center for Multimedia in Education and Research) at Technische Universität Berlin. He is part of the board of editors of ITSE and is a member of the DIN-NI 36 committee that cooperates with ISO SC-36 in creating e-learning standards. Before joining Technische Universität he spent time as scientific consultant in a research project for a state-founded TV broadcaster, the “Sender Freies Berlin,” followed by positions as researcher and instructor at the multimedia group at the Computer Science Department of Freie Universität Berlin and as lecturer in International Media and Computing at the FHTW Berlin. Lars Knipping received his PhD degree for his work on the eChalk system and holds MSc degrees in both Mathematics and Computer Science. For his eChalk system he received several prizes including the JAX Innovation Award 2006 (2nd place), the European Academic Software Award 2002, and the Multimedia Business Idea Award ("Gründerpreis Multimedia”) 2000 by the German Federal Ministry of Economy.

Nadine Ludwig Graduated from Technische Universität Ilmenau with a degree in Computer Science in 2005. In her diploma thesis she described the integration of remote laboratories in Learning Content Management Systems via SCORM. From June 2006 until April 2010 Nadine Ludwig was part of the MuLF Center at Berlin Institute of Technology as a research assistant where she conducted research on cooperative knowledge spaces and the integration of semantic web technologies to improve the navigation through room-based e-learning platforms. In May 2010 she joined the research group on Semantic Technologies at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering in Potsdam and is currently working on the issue of Semantic Entity Mapping of Linked Data.

Robert MertensR eceived his BSc in Cognitive Science and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Osnabrück in 2002 and 2007 respectively. During his undergraduate studies he spent a couple of months working as an intern at DaimlerChrysler RTC in Palo Alto, CA in 2000/2001. After finishing his Bachelor's degree, he started working at the University of Osnabrück's virtual teaching support center (virtUOS). There he developed the first version of virtPresenter, a web lecturing system which is still in use and parts of which are used in Opencast Matterhorn. In 2006 he was a visiting researcher on a DAAD grant at the University of Pittsburgh for a couple of months. He started working at Fraunhofer IAIS in 2007 and is an active member of the multimedia community. Robert Mertens has published actively in the fields of e-learning, multimedia and telecommunications and is currently giving lectures and courses on multimedia and programming at the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück, the University of Osnabrück and the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg.

Education is one of the most important application areas for multimedia technologies. Universities and other educational institutions enhance their educational portfolio by using new technologies. Video and audio capture of lectures has become a common practice to produce e-learning content. Simulations allow to explore experiments which would be too expensive or too dangerous to be conducted physically by students. Multimedia-powered demonstrations are freed from many physical restrictions such as the availability of an object to study or the timescale of an effect to observe. Teaching enriched by vivid presentations and possibilities for interaction for students can also gain from improved learner's motivation. Concepts may be realized in a demonstration and the observability of important details can be augmented. With the present amounts of produced educational data, there is a high demand in techniques and methods capable of handling multimedia contents adequately. Educational content has to be presented, deployed, stored, navigated, searched, retrieved, edited, combined, and reused in a proper way. Furthermore, quality control and learning processes with feedback loops are considered to be important concepts for more effective and sustainable e-learning solutions. Multimedia technologies facilitate the evaluation, improvement, and assurance of quality in loopback controlled e-learning processes.

Most of these topics involve techniques from artificial intelligence, computer vision, and multimedia, but also human computer interaction, educational science, and psychology. The Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-learning was held in San Diego, California in December 2009 and brought experts from these respective fields together. The workshop program consisted of two sessions. Seven papers were presented in total in both sessions (Brdiczka et al., 2009).

The articles of this special issue of Interactive Technology and Smart Education are the revised and significantly extended versions of outstanding papers presented at the MTEL 2009 workshop.

Video capturing of lectures is a widespread approach to produce e-learning materials as a byproduct from university teaching these days. However, consuming these recordings can be tedious for learners given the typical length of a lecture, especially if the users are looking only for a specific subtopic. To tackle this problem these digital videos need to be structured and indexed according to their content. In “Content-based indexing and teaching focus mining for lecture videos” the authors approach this problem for video recordings of slide-based lectures through a combination of several techniques. After eliminating effects like changes in lighting and slide occlusions by the presenter, slide transitions are identified. For each slide text and figures are extracted to serve as indexing data. In addition the presenter's behavior is analyzed to identify the more important parts of the extracted content. The presenter's gestures such as pointers on parts of the slides emphasize the content that was pointed to and some features in speech provide this information for location in time.

The second article of this special issue “iTest: online assessment and self-assessment in mathematics”, describes activities accomplished to integrate alternative assessment and self-assessment tools in mathematics courses. The software tool “iTest” has originally been developed to support the continuous evaluation system promoted by the European Space for Higher Education. To cyclically design, implement, and analyze the results of the activities, the authors followed a design-based research methodology which also facilitates the collaboration between researchers and teachers. The results of these activities show that iTest is a good testing tool for units that focus on skills and procedural development as well as for units that are problem-based and require visualization and manipulation of geometric representations.

The article “Opencast Matterhorn: a community-driven open source software project for producing, managing, and distributing academic video” presents the project Matterhorn, the major endeavor of the Opencast community to create an end-to-end, open source solution that supports scheduling, capture, managing, encoding, and delivery of educational audio and video content as well as the engagement of users with that content. The article details the phases of workflow when using Matterhorn ranging from preparing, capturing, and processing of lectures to engaging potential users or consumers of content. The underlying technology is described and project milestones and progress are depicted.

Finally, “Social navigation in web lectures: a study of virtPresenter” reports results obtained from a classroom study with a social navigation interface for web lectures. Social navigation enables users to be aware of the navigation paths other users have taken in a document and to be guided by these traces. Social navigation has already been employed in many e-learning scenarios with text- and picture-based hypermedia. The article describes a system that implements social navigation for video-based web lectures. The classroom study of this system is comprised of a log file analysis and a questionnaire study. The results show that social navigation is a promising navigation concept for web lectures. They also show that social navigation in web lectures requires that a critical mass of a video (in this case 15 percent of the video's duration) show social navigation traces from other users.

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank the reviewers of this special issue for their detailed and thoughtful work:

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Helmar Burkhart, University of Basel, Switzerland
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Paul Dickson, University of Massachusetts, USA
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Sabina Jeschke, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
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Wolfgang Hürst, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
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Markus Ketterl, University of Osnabrück, Germany
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Ulrich Kortenkamp, University of Education Karlsruhe, Germany
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Fleming Lampi, Kavisio, Germany
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Ying Li, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA
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Jean-Claude Moissinac, ENST Paris, France
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Thomas Richter, University of Stuttgart, Germany
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Jochen Schwenniger, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany
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Jürgen Steimle, Darmstadt Institute of Technology, Germany
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Georg Turban, Darmstadt Institute of Technology, Germany
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Dominique Vaufreydaz, Université Pierre-Mendès, France
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Heinz-Dietrich Wuttke, Ilmenau Institute of Technology, Germany
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Peter Ziewer, Munich Institute of Technology, Germany

They would like to thank all authors for their quick revision and extension of the papers presented at the workshop and for their valuable contributions. Their commitment made it possible to release this special issue quickly.

Oliver Brdiczka, Lars Knipping, Nadine Ludwig and Robert MertensGuest Editors

Reference

Brdiczka, O., Knipping, L., Ludwig, N. and Mertens, R. (2009), “Fourth IEEE International Workshop in Multimedia Technologies for E-learning”, Proceedings of the Eleventh IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM), San Diego, CA, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC.

Multimedia technologies for e-learning

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