Themed Section: MTEL

Citation

Ketterl, M., Mertens, R. and Sack, H. (2012), "Themed Section: MTEL", Interactive Technology and Smart Education, Vol. 9 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/itse.2012.36309daa.002

Themed Section: MTEL

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Interactive Technology and Smart Education, Volume 9, Issue 4

About the Guest Editors.

Markus Ketterl is currently a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Osnabrück where his research interests are adaptive multimedia systems, social navigation, multimedia analysis and applications for mobile devices. He is working at Fraunhofer IAIS as a Research Engineer. He also is a founding member of UC Berkeley’s Opencast project where he is one of the leading developers and has been part of the Executive Advisory Board. Besides further freelancing and advisory activities he is a program or technical committee member at different scientific conferences. During his PhD program he is teaching Web technologies and Software Engineering at the University.

Robert Mertens is Professor for Application Development and Media Informatics at the HSW University of Applied Sciences in Hamelin, Germany. He received his BSc in cognitive science and his PhD in computer science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany in 2002 and 2007, respectively. During all previous stages of his academic career, he has spent time on international research stays: In 2000/2001 as an intern at DaimlerChrysler RTC in Palo Alto, CA, in 2006 as a visiting research scholar at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA, and in 2011 as a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, CA. In 2002 he started developing the virtPresenter lecture recording system and worked on multimedia interfaces at the University of Osnabrück’s virtual teaching support center (virtUOS). In 2007 he took a position at Fraunhofer IAIS in Sankt Augustin where he worked as project manager and consultant. At ICSI he worked on audio processing and machine learning for multimedia event detection. He started working in his current position in 2012. Robert also is an active member of the scientific community, in 2011 he served as Technical Program Co-Chair for the IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing and in 2012 he serves as Program Co-Chair for the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia.

Harald Sack is Senior Research Fellow at the Hasso Plattner-Institute for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) at the University of Potsdam. After graduating in computer science at the University of the Federal Forces Munich Campus in 1990, he worked as systems/network engineer and project manager in the signal intelligence corps of the German federal forces from 1990 to 1997. In 1997 he became an associated member of the graduate program “mathematical optimization” at the University of Trier and graduated with a PhD thesis on formal verification in 2002. From 2002 to 2008 he did research and teaching as a postdoc at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena and since 2007 he has a visiting position at the HPI, where he now is head of the research group ”semantic technologies”. His areas of research include multimedia retrieval, semantic web technologies, knowledge representations, machine learning and semantic enabled retrieval. Since 2008 he also serves as general secretary of the German IPv6 council.

Multimedia and e-learning

Multimedia data and applications have become an essential part of education in the fast emerging world of network-based communication. The provision of user-friendly, interactive, and meaningful interfaces enable ease of use, self-paced intuitive interaction as well as greater efficiency for learning. Learning theory in the past decade has expanded dramatically because of the introduction of multimedia, while the possibilities of multimedia deployment for learning and instruction are nearly endless. The recording of lectures and scientific presentations and their provision on the World Wide Web put the learner in the position to follow the course of action independently of time and location. Teaching can be enriched by vivid presentations grasping the attention of the students and leveraging their motivation. Internet-based communication in connection with multimedia based training courses facilitate an environment for collaboration towards virtual classrooms, where students although being thousands of miles apart might coordinate their work. Thus, the tasks of planning, production, design, development, testing, evaluation, and publishing multimedia applications for learning play an important role in presentation, deployment, navigation, search and retrieval, editing and recombination of educational content. Most of these topics also involve technologies from artificial intelligence, multimedia analysis, and information retrieval, but also human computer interaction, educational science, and psychology to enable media coherence for e-learning purposes. The “Sixth IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning” was held in Dana Point, California, USA, in December 2011 and brought experts from these respective fields together. The workshop program consisted of three sessions with six presentations in total. The articles of this special issue of Interactive Technology and Smart Education are the revised and significantly enhanced versions of two outstanding papers presented at the MTEL 2011 Workshop. The first article discusses requirements and strategies for using synchronous e-learning systems regarding communication, collaboration and social interaction. The authors propose the architecture of a flexible meeting room platform (MRP) as an example implementation that can be used to extend the limitations of todays learn management platforms. In the beginning the authors describe principles for interacting with existing systems and describe different use cases as well as technology scenarios for using the proposed ideas and software components. The system’s architecture is being explained from a technical standpoint and is further compared to state-of-the-art commercial online collaboration systems. The second article describes the virtual programming laboratory VIPLab from different angles ranging from architecture and system integration in a university’s IT infrastructure to user studies and experiences gathered in a production environment. The idea behind VIPLab is to provide students with ready-to-use software development environments required for their field of study in order to eliminate the need for students to install and configure numerous software development tools that are often required for one course only. This concept frees up student time for course work and learning. The system also comes with tutoring and grading support and thus facilitates online teaching. System features include remote graphics and visualization of results calculated on servers to fully emulate specialized software capabilities as well as functions that allow for the exclusion of predefined libraries in order to guide student focus in learning and experimenting. The article shows the benefits of virtual programming laboratories but it also shows where pitfalls lie in both development and deployment as well as valuable insights and experiences as to how these pitfalls can be circumvented.

Acknowledgements

They would like to thank all authors for their quick revision and extension of the papers presented at the workshop and for their valuable contributions. Their commitment made it possible to publish this theme section quickly and in high quality.

The Theme Editors wish to thank the reviewers of this special section for their detailed and thoughtful work:Lora Aroyo, University of Amsterdam, The NetherlandsMichael Auer, University of Applied Sciences Kärnten, AustriaOliver Brdiczka, Palo Alto Research Center, USAHelmar Burkhart, University of Basel, SwitzerlandChristopher Brooks, University of Saskatchewan, CanadaPaul Dickson, University of Massachusetts, USASabina Jeschke, RWTH Aachen, GermanyWolfgang Hürst, Utrecht University, The NetherlandsUlrich Kortenkamp, University of Education Karlsruhe, GermanyFleming Lampi, Kavisio, GermanyYing Li, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USAJochen Schwenninger, Fraunhofer IAIS, GermanyThomas Richter, University of Stuttgart, GermanyJürgen Steimle, MIT Media Lab, USAGeorg Turban, Darmstadt Institute of Technology, GermanyDominique Vaufreydaz, Univ. Pierre Mends-France, FranceHeinz-Dietrich Wuttke, Ilmenau Institute of Technology, GermanyPeter Ziewer, Munich Institute of Technology, Germany

Markus Ketterl, Robert Mertens, Harald SackGuest Editors