Guest editorial for special issue on Multimedia Technology for E-learning

• Interactive Technology and Smart Education

Education is one of the most important application areas for multimedia technologies. Universities and other educational institutions enhance their educational portfolio by using new technologies. Video and audio capture of lectures has become a common practice to produce e-learning content. Simulations allow exploring experiments which would be too expensive or too dangerous to be conducted physically by students. Multimedia-powered demonstrations are freed from many physical restrictions such as the availability of an object to study or the timescale of an effect to observe. Teaching enriched by vivid presentations and possibility for interaction for students can also gain from improved learner's motivation. Concepts may be given perceivable existence in a demonstration and the observability of important details can be augmented.

With the present amounts of educational data produced, there is a high demand in techniques and methods capable of handling multimedia contents adequately. Educational content has to be presented, deployed, navigated, searched, retrieved, edited, combined, and reused in a proper way.

Quality control and learning processes with feedback loops are considered to be important concepts for more effective and sustainable e-learning solutions. Multimedia technologies facilitate the evaluation, improvement, and assurance of quality in loopback controlled e-learning processes. Multimedia feedback from individual and collaborative learning processes is essential for loopback control, spanning from human feedback on e-learning processes, computer-generated multimedia feedback, feedback concerning the transition from traditional to multimedia content (including authoring processes), and meta-feedback. The goals are the online adaptation of a multimedia e-learning system, the improvement of the quality of the next version of such a system, or the integration of the quality feedback in the teaching/learning process. Most of these topics involve techniques from artificial intelligence, computer vision, multimedia, but also human computer interaction, educational science and psychology.

citation

Brdiczka, O.; Knipping, L.; Ludwig, N. Multimedia technology for e-learning (guest editorial). Special issue of Interactive Technology and Smart Education. 2009; 6 (2): 80-81.