A technological framework for TV-supported collaborative learning

Interactive digital TV is emerging as a potentially important medium to create opportunities for learning at home. To date, the offer has been mostly based on the contents available through broadcast, but this is expected to change in the near future. The increasing availability of high-quality bidirectional networks, together with the fact that IDTV users are abandoning their passive habits, envisages a new range of highly interactive services that may enhance greatly the prospects of distance education. This paper introduces a technological framework for the development and deployment of distributed and collaborative educational services for IDTV, proposing an extension to the multimedia home platform standard. The framework is based on a selection of freely available technologies, which we integrate into a CASE tool that bridges the gap between course-authoring and programming tasks. We also discuss the possible market implications of our approach, because the ideas presented here contribute to openness in the field of IDTV services, so far monopolised by mainstream broadcasters.