Indexing and retrieval of multimodal lecture recordings from open repositories for personalized access in modern learning settings

An increasing number of lecture recordings are available to complement face-to face and the more conventional content-based e-learning approaches. These recordings provide additional channels for remote students and time-independent access to the lectures. Many universities offer even complete series of recordings of hundreds of courses which are available for public access and this service provides added value for users outside the university. The lecture recordings show the use of a great variety of media or modalities (such as video, audiom lecture media, presentation behaviour) and formats. Insofar, none of the existing systems and services have sufficient retrieval functionality or support appropriate interfaces to enable searching for lecture recordings over several repositories. This situation has motivated us to initiate research on a lecture recording indexing and retrieval system for knowledge transfer and learning activities in various settings. This system is built on our former experiences and prototypes developed within the MISTRAL research project. In this paper we outline requirements for an enhanced lecture recording retrieval system, introduce our solution and prototype, and discuss the initial results and findings

3D virtual worlds as a tool for collaborative learning settings in geographically dispersed environments

There is a growing awareness of virtual 3D worlds such as Second Life and Sun Wonderland within the general population. Virtual 3D worlds are no longer just for the stereotypical geek. By 2011 it is estimated that about 80 % of active Internet users will have an “avatar ” and a “second life ” in some form of virtual world environment. The current virtual world environment is utilized widely as a knowledge and social tool. In recent years, universities are experimenting the use of virtual 3D worlds for teaching and learning. This paper presents a virtual learning environment created using Second Life which provides a common virtual space for students to work collaboratively to accomplish a set task. An experiment is conducted involving university students who are enrolled in a unit with the aim of assessing the use of Second Life for collaborative learning. A pre-survey evaluation was gathered followed by a post-survey evaluation. The results of these evaluations as well as lessons learned during the implementation phase are discussed in this paper.

Enhancements of Meeting Information Management and Application for Knowledge Access and Learning Activities

Communication processes have become increasingly important in modern working life. Organizations invest a surprisingly high amount of financial resources and employee work time in both face-to-face and virtual meetings, yet this investment often produces poor results. To overcome this problem, research on technology-based support over a meeting’s life-cycle has been increasingly conducted in recent decades. As a result of this research, particular interest has emerged in meeting information systems, which may include technology-enhanced meeting rooms as well as tools for multi-modal meeting recording, automatic meeting information extraction and annotation, in-meeting support, meeting information archiving, indexing, retrieval and visualization. Despite this great interest in and research activity on meeting information systems, insufficient focus has been paid into flexible architectures, interchangeability of meeting information as well as the integration into business processes and applications. This situation has motivated our research consortium to direct the research activity within the MISTRAL project towards a flexible and extendable system that can be easily integrated into daily working environments for knowledge access and learning activities. In this paper, we give an overview about electronic meeting systems, introduce related work on meeting information systems, outline the MISTRAL concept and its implementation, and based on that we discuss findings and problems with our research