Web Lectures and Web 2.0

At many universities, Web lectures have become an integral part of the e-learning portfolio over the last few years. While many aspects of the technology involved, like automatic recording techniques or innovative interfaces for replay, have evolved at a rapid pace, Web lecturing has been independent of other important developments such as Web 2.0.Web 2.0 is an emerging trend that among other things aims at integrating user generated data from different systems in order to enhance the user experience. This paper discusses the benefits Web lecturing could gain from a Web 2.0 perspective. It also introduces a prototypical interface for the virtPresenter lecture viewer that enriches Web lectures by Web 2.0 features, such as a specialized player that can be integrated in blog or wiki sites and multi-medial links that can be used to reference arbitrary passages of a Web lecture from an external blog, wiki or forum.