A secure collaborative multimedia learning scheme in cultural environments

Nowadays distance learning becomes more and more popular because it is an economical, flexible and self-adaptive form of education. Collaborative learning environments provide users (both learners and instructors) conditions for better communication and cooperation. Moreover, multimedia content due to its friendliness is preferred in such environments as it enhances the learning process. Such environments that are now quite popular can be used for the education in specific cultural areas. Cultural environments are special types of environments where users need the provision of high-quality smart services like collaborative interactive learning applications in a friendly, cheap and personalized way. In this work, we present an online collaborative learning environment where the instructors insert learning material that the learners can view. User and course material classification aims at supporting distance learning scenarios that cover the needs of various user groups such as art classes, teachers and students. This learning material is essentially multimedia cultural content, distributed via the Internet and so it must be protected against any misuse. Therefore, a security scheme is proposed in order to ensure the integrity and the authenticity of the distributed multimedia content. The proposed security scheme is based on attribute-based access control and the usage of digital certificates.