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The purpose of this paper is to is to describe vector graphics for web lectures, focusing on the experiences with Adobe Flash 9 and SVG.

The paper presents experiences made during the development and everyday use of two versions of the lecture‐recording system virtPresenter. The first of these versions is based on SVG, while the second is based on Adobe Flex2 (Flash 9) technology. The paper points out the advantages vector graphics can bring for web lectures and briefly presents a hypermedia navigation interface for web lectures that is based on SVG. The paper also compares the formats Flash and SVG and concludes with describing changes in workflows for administrators and users that have become possible with Flash.

Vector graphics are an ideal content format for slide‐based lecture recordings. File sizes can be kept small and graphics can be displayed in superior quality. Information about text and slide objects is stored symbolically, which allows texts to be searched and objects on slides to be used interactively, for example, for navigation purposes. The use of vector graphics for web lectures is, however, a trend that has begun only recently. A major reason for this is that multiple media formats have to be combined in order to replay video and slides.

The paper offers in insight into vector graphics as an ideal content format for slide‐based lecture recordings.

The purpose of this paper is to present a user interface for web lectures for engaging with other users while working with video based learning content. The application allows its users to ask questions about the content and to get answers from those users that currently online are more familiar with it. The filtering is based on the evaluation of past user interaction data in time‐based media.

The work is implemented as a prototype application in the context of the Opencast Matterhorn project – an open source based project for producing, managing and distributing academic video content. The application compares users viewing behavior and allows communication with others that are good candidates to answer questions.

Different filtering approaches for identifying suitable candidates are being discussed that foster past interactions in time‐based media.

The paper shows that web lectures can benefit from user awareness ideas and presents examples of how learners can benefit from the knowledge of other users who are working with the same video based content.

User awareness has become an important feature in today's Web 2.0 experience. The paper discusses different user awareness models and explains how they can be adapted to time‐based video content. The presented work is available as a plug‐in for the Opencast Matterhorn project.

At many universities, web lectures have become an integral part of the e‐learning portfolio over the last few years. While many aspects of the technology involved, like automatic recording techniques or innovative interfaces for replay, have evolved at a rapid pace, web lecturing has remained independent of other important developments such as Web 2.0. The aim of this paper is to exemplify and discuss the benefits web lecturing can gain from a Web 2.0 perspective.

The paper describes an implementation of three Web 2.0 features for the virtPresenter web lecture interface. These are time‐based social footprints, a mechanism for linking to user created bookmarks in a web lecture from external Web 2.0 applications and a special web lecture player that enables users to embed their own web lecture bookmarks in wikis or blogs.

The paper shows how conceptual and technical obstacles in bringing Web 2.0 features like social footprints to web lectures can be overcome. It also makes evident that linking web lectures in Web 2.0 systems require special adaptations due to the time‐based nature of web lectures. The technical discussion shows that many Web 2.0 features require feedback channels in order to communicate information back to servers (e.g. to understand how the content is used) and that most contemporary media players have to be modified in order to support feedback channels.

The paper shows that web lectures can benefit from Web 2.0 ideas and presents examples how Web 2.0 and web lectures can be brought together.

Web 2.0 is a popular trend that transforms the way in which the internet is used. This paper shows how web lectures can be enriched with Web 2.0 features and how they can be integrated with Web 2.0 systems by discussing three implementation examples.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Opencast Community, a global community of individuals, institutions, and commercial stakeholders exchanging knowledge about all matters relevant in the context of academic video and promoting projects in this context. It also gives an overview of the most prominent of these projects, Opencast Matterhorn – a community‐driven open source solution for producing, managing, and distributing academic video.

The paper will demonstrate that Opencast Matterhorn is satisfying institutional needs to manage audiovisual content more efficiently as video is becoming a significant resource in research and education. Furthermore, the paper highlights that Opencast Matterhorn as a product and as a project is open for contributions from the research community and provides an excellent environment for the integration of research results from media analysis, multimedia authoring, search technologies, and other related fields.

Opencast Matterhorn provides a scalable open source solution for universities to manage academic video. Its service‐oriented architecture makes it customizable to institutional needs and open for contributions from users as well as media research.

The paper provides an insight to the idea of Opencast, the Opencast Community, and Opencast Matterhorn – and how they will help academic institutions to better manage and exploit the full richness of educational video.

Lecture recordings can be a powerful addition to traditional lectures and they can even serve as a main content source in a number of didactic scenarios. If users can quickly locate relevant passages in a recording, the recording combines the ease of search that comes with electronic text based media with the authenticity and wealth of information that is delivered in a live lecture. Locating relevant passages in a time based media such as a recorded lecture is, however, not as easy as searching an electronic text document. This article presents the virtPresenter lecture recording system that tackles navigation in web lectures with a hypermedia navigation concept that is improved with interactive content overviews. Apart from navigation in web lectures the article also addresses didactic scenarios for web lectures and issues related to the workflow of recording lectures.

Improving the use of annotations in lecture recordings.

Requirements analysis with scenario based design (SBD) on focus groups.

These seven points have been extracted from the feedback of the focus groups: (1) Control of the annotation feature (turn on/turn off). (2) An option to decide who is able to see their comments (groups, lecturer, friends). (3) An easy and paper-like experience in creating a comment. (4) An option to discuss comments. (5) An option to import already existing comments. (6) Color-coding of the different types of comments. (7) An option to print their annotations within the context of the recording.

The study was performed to improve the open-source lecture recording system Opencast Matterhorn.

Annotations can help to enable the students that use lecture recordings to move from a passive watching to an active viewing and reflecting.

The purpose of this study is to present a depth information-based solution for automatic camera control, depending on the presenter’s moving positions. Talks, presentations and lectures are often captured on video to give a broad audience the possibility to (re-)access the content. As presenters are often moving around during a talk, it is necessary to steer recording cameras.

We use depth information from Kinect to implement a prototypical application to automatically steer multiple cameras for recording a talk.

We present our experiences with the system during actual lectures at a university. We found out that Kinect is applicable for tracking a presenter during a talk robustly. Nevertheless, our prototypical solution reveals potential for improvements, which we discuss in our future work section.

Tracking a presenter is based on a skeleton model extracted from depth information instead of using two-dimensional (2D) motion- or brightness-based image processing techniques. The solution uses a scalable networking architecture based on publish/subscribe messaging for controlling multiple video cameras.