Authoring Multimedia Learning Material Using Open Standards and Free Software

Technological support to learning and teaching has become widespread due to computers and Internet ubiquity. Particularly e-learning platforms permit the any time and any place distribution of interactive multimedia learning materials. There are commercial tools available to author this kind of content, usually based on proprietary formats. This option has some drawbacks like license cost and software company dependency. To use open data standards and free software is an alternative without these inconveniences but available authoring tools are commonly less productive. This shortcoming is certainly important to non technical authors and it could be solved by open source collaboration. With this work we try to contribute to this endeavor in the case of synchronized multimedia presentations. Our proposal is based on SMIL as composition language particularly we reuse and customize the SMIL technical presentation template used in INRIA. We also propose a set of free tools to produce presentation content focusing on RealPlayer as delivery client.