The multimedia authoring in collaborative e-learning system

The rapid development of wired/wireless Internet technologies and computing devices, such as desktop, laptop and tablet PC, make it possible for education or collaborative work to move the real world to virtual spaces. Therefore e-learning with virtual collaboration through the Internet is expected to go as a powerful educational tool and enables users to study or work together anytime and anywhere. In this paper, the proposed system consists of two parts - multimedia authoring and recordable virtual collaboration. The former supports synchronized multimedia presentation using Synchronous Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). It allows synchronization of the contents of a PowerPoint presentation file and a video file so that the presentation shows slides and video on the same topic at any given time. Participants can use text along with associated symbols during the discussion over the presented power point slides. The symbols such as arrows or polygons have x-y coordinates within the slides to represent associated participants´ questions and answers. Those can be set or removed dynamically to represent areas of questions in slides using so called layered architecture that separates slide layer from annotation layer. Those annotations can be easily hidden for training purposes. XML files are used to record participants´ questions and answers along with the associated annotations over some particular images.