Human-Centered Multimedia E-Learning System for Real-Time Interactive Distance Education

Human-centered computing embeds the human factors such as social and cultural awareness, human abilities, and adaptability to others´ activities in the information system and methodology design. This paper proposes a human-centered multimedia E-learning system to address several classical difficulties in distance education via Internet: poor video frame quality, high requirement of network bandwidth, and inefficient interaction. We propose a novel data partition and authoring method to improve the image quality of the lecture notes, handwritings, and web pages. We use a peer-to-peer network structure to support real-time multimedia data broadcasting. The system can provide the real-time interaction between the remote students and the instructor just like in the classroom lecture. This system also records the multimedia data with an operation log file to support offline multimedia retrieval and summarization. We test our system under the practical education environment in our university for one semester.