ODCSSS gain

"Odysseus students should gain strength from their numbers both prior, during and after this internship program. We hope these students will form connections with their peers and mentors that will last well beyond the 12 weeks with us"

Improving Multimedia Content Authoring in Adaptive eLearning Systems

Odysseus: 
2010

Background:

Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as Moodle, Blackboard or Sakai, are currently the most common application of eLearning, being widely used by educational and governmental institutions as well as by companies. Moodle alone has more than 41.000 validated deployments, with more than 33 million users across 206 countries. LMSs provide a complete virtual learning environment by integrating a multitude of tools that facilitate the creation and upload of educational material, the management and scheduling of learning activities, the evaluation of students, the communication and collaboration between peers, etc. LMSs however, usually provide the same content to all the learners in a group, without to consider that they may differ at an individual level. Unlike LMSs, Adaptive eLearning Systems (AeLS), automatically personalise the learning process and the educational content based on learners’ individual characteristics such as their preferences, knowledge level, skills, etc. AeLS however, are rarely used since they usually lack a rich interface, as well as many of the other tools that made LMSs become so popular.
Adaptive Learning Spaces (ALS), a now completed project, has narrowed the gap between the two types of e-learning systems, by integrating AHA!, a state-of-the-art adaptive system that personalises the educational content based on learners’ characteristics, into Sakai LMS. On another side multimedia content is increasingly used in eLearning courses, and more and more people start to use their mobile devices for accessing them. Mobile devices differ a lot in terms of characteristics such as the screen resolution, processing power or battery life. Furthermore, wireless networks not only that have reduced capacity as compared to wired networks, but their available bandwidth is also affected by variable network conditions such as number of users, distance of the base station, interference, etc.
 
Aim:
 
Although various algorithms have been proposed for adapting the multimedia content, in order to reduce the impact of these variations on the end-user, their implementation in existing eLearning systems, is very reduced if none. This project will make an important step towards facilitating the implementation of such algorithms, by developing an application for improving the management of the multimedia educational content that is being used in the course creation.
 
Outcome:
 
The application will primarily consist in a Web interface, and will have capabilities such as:
·      Uploading / removing of multimedia educational content to / from the server.
·      Automatically extraction of metadata information from the multimedia clips being uploaded.
·      Viewing / editing of metadata for multimedia clips that are already stored on the server.
·      Setting of the encoding parameters needed to generate multiple versions for the multimedia clips. These versions will be used by the adaptation algorithms, and will be created automatically every time a multimedia clip is uploaded. Open-source software such as MEncoder or FFmpeg CLI will be used for this purpose.
·      The solution will be integrated with the ALS system, and will be tested using an already existing course, which will be extended with multimedia educational content.
 
Useful Links:
 
Requirements:

The student should have a good knowledge of web programming technologies in general (HTML, Javascript, AJAX and a server-side scripting language such as PHP, in particular). Knowledge of SQL and Shell scripting is a plus.
 
 
Supervisors and Mentors: 
Dr. Cristina Muntean
Dr. Gabriel-Miro Muntean
Host: 
DCU