TOWARDS DEVELOPING AN INTEGRATED MULTIMEDIA
FRAMEWORK FOR ENHANCED e-LEARNING
G. G. D. Nishantha, Dang H. Anh, Davar Pishva, W. B. Claster
ICT Institute, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Oita, Japan
Yukuo Hayashida
Faculty of Engineering, Saga University, Saga, Japan
Keywords: Learning Management system, LMS, umeLMS, Multimedia streaming, Mobile learning, Lecture recording.
Abstract: In recent years, information and communication technology and multimedia technology have increasingly
altered the landscape of the educational field particularly in higher education. In that, e-learning in its broad
sense makes use of network and computing resources for bringing general education to the potential benefits
of distant education and face to face classroom education. The amount of multimedia support facilitated by
the e-learning systems has given significant consideration in order to make distance education as effective
as classroom education and make the blended leaning experience more effective. While the technology is
moving toward a multimedia rich learning management system, its practical deployments is still far away,
due to many unsolved technical and pedagogical problems. In this paper we discuss the design and
implementation of a prototype system umeLMS which features an integrated framework that interacts with a
rich set of hypermedia contents and provides ubiquitous access. The main focus of this design is threefold:
first input integration by which multimedia can be incorporated into the LMS in various ways. Second,
content Integration by which different forms of hypermedia is linked to the course contents. Third, access
integration by which a wide array of mobile devices are supported for multimedia content browsing which
creates a real u-learning environment by enabling active participation in the learning/teaching process.
1 INTRODUCTION
In recent years, information and communication
technology and multimedia technology have
increasingly altered the landscape of the educational
field particularly in higher education. Ritsumeikan
Asia Pacific University (APU) in Japan, whose
mission is to create world leaders in Science,
Management and Economics through a bilingual
curriculum, has increasingly been using many
computer supported learning and teaching modalities
to promote its educational delivery, since its
establishment in 2000. The authors have involved in
developing a prototype system (Nishantha, 2008)
that extends APU’s e-learning platform with
interactive multimedia.
Computer modalities and software systems,
which are used to achieve the blended learning
objectives together with the support to administrate
and monitor educational courses are generally
termed Learning Management Systems (LMS)
(Bersin, 2008). Choosing an LMS platform,
however, is a critical decision which can have a
significant impact on the academic institutions’
ability to help students and lecturers meet their
educational objectives.
Use of multimedia in learning content has been
identified as an important element (Chris, 2007).
According to United States Department of Defense
data (Oblinger, 1991), we have short-term retention
of approximately 20% of what we hear, 40% of what
we see and hear, and 75% of what we see, hear, and
do. The WebCT/Blackboard system (BlackBoard
inc., 2009), heavily used commercial LMS today,
has integrated virtual classroom/collaboration
functionality in its latest (Windows Vista
compatible) version. Moodle, a heavily used open
source LMS, has also integrated a multimedia plug-
in, named DimDim, to facilitate primitive video
conferencing capability. Many academic institutions
267
Nishantha G., Anh D., Pishva D., B. Claster W. and Hayashida Y. (2009).
TOWARDS DEVELOPING AN INTEGRATED MULTIMEDIA FRAMEWORK FOR ENHANCED e-LEARNING.
In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 266-271
DOI: 10.5220/0001977202660271
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

Figure 1: Activities throughout a course life cycle in a fully integrated LMS.
reportedly have added an array of custom
multimedia functionalities either as an integrated
tool to the LMS or as an independent tool to quickly
cater the demanding needs for multimedia
functionalities. While the technology is moving
toward a multimedia rich learning management
system, its practical deployments is still far away,
due to many unsolved technical and pedagogical
problems. Therefore, in Asia Pacific University in
Japan, we have started developing a Ubiquitous
Multimedia Enhanced Learning Management
System (umeLMS) to enhance its education quality
while reducing the user burden. The term ume
(ゆめ：pronounced as Yume) in Japanese Language
means dream: hence we envision an ideal LMS
(dream LMS) to enhance the quality of education.
In this paper, we present our three fold
contribution to enhance LMS. Firstly, input
integration by which multimedia can be ingested
into the LMS in many ways. Second, content
Integration by which different forms of multimedia
interact with the course contents. Thirdly, access
integration by which a real u-learning environment
is made possible by allowing an array of mobile
devices to participate actively in the
learning/teaching process.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, we present the design rationale of the
proposes system. Section 3 presents implementation
and deployment of webELS prototype. Conclusions
appear in section 4.
2 DESIGN RATIONALE
In devising a prototype for a Multimedia Enhanced
Ubiquitous Learning Management System,
considerations should be given to all stake holders of
the system to be provided with facilities to (a)
reduce cost and time consumption (b) reduce
workload (c) enhance educational quality (d)
enhance the accessibility and (e) enhance usability.
In achieving some of these objectives rich use of
multimedia plays a significant role. Figure 1
illustrates the activities and interaction of a fully
integrated LMS over a generic course life cycle
indicating the interaction of all stakeholders (i.e.
administrators, teachers & lectures with the contents
stored in LMS store and the interfaces provided).
Multimedia is used in this model with close
integration with the lecture content for supporting
students to understand the course content, report
back to the lecturer as well as group discussions.
Further, multimedia is an integral component to
realize smart classrooms that serves outside
audiences.
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Figure 2: Modular architecture of umeLMS.
2.1 Design Architecture
Despite the availability of many famous open source
learning management systems, we have opted to
implement a novel system to cater for the special
needs of the system that we envision.
The access interface identifies the client side
devices and performs custom rendering to the
device’s screen resolution. Personal computer (PC)
and mobile devices like third generation mobile
phone and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) could
access the system through mobile connections like
3G or through wireless LAN connections.
The target learning system essentially consists of
four functional modules as shown in Figure 2
namely: user management module (UMM), learning
management module (LMM), internship
management module (IMM), and content
management module (CMM). UMM manages users
as well as user groups and provides access
authorization to the system resources through the
functional modules LMM and MMM. LMM
manages the learning and teaching where students
teachers and administrators interacts with didactic
and administrative material. Multimedia
Management Module (MMM) houses the
functionality to handle multimedia. This modular
design enables networking with the other functional
modules developed by the authors (e.g. projects
management module in (Long, 2008) as well as
exiting third party modules.
2.2 Content Integration
Three types of integration methods are incorporated
in webLMS, namely: input integration, content
integration and access integration.
2.2.1 Input Integration
Input integration refers to capturing various
multimedia inputs to enhance the richness of lecture
contents. Following multimedia input methods are
of major concern for maximizing multimedia effects
in teaching as well as learning.
• Lecture recording:
Lecture recording has become more and more
popular in every university nowadays. However, in
most cases it is used as a single stream audio video
recording and often not integrated to the LMS. In
this paper we propose a cost efficient methodology
that uses a single dedicated PC per classroom to
process inputs and form a composite stream for
recording as illustrated in Figure 3. Three video
inputs are captured from three IP cameras pointing
to the lecturer’s desk, whiteboard and the students
and combined at the dedicated PC and then archived
at the Flash Media Server (FMS) (Adobe Inc.,
2008).
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269

Figure 3: Lecture recording architecture.
• User side recording:
The users should be facilitated with an interface to
upload live audio/video recordings which allows
them to submit their reports/suggestions/comments
using rich multimedia formats. This enables
enhanced interaction among students and teachers
by providing an interface to answer or issue queries
without wasting time, without the need to be active
to respond, and without the need to be familiar with
multimedia processing knowledge.
• Live conferencing:
Live conferencing features are considered as a very
strong tool used in many areas like business,
medical, and government. In education, live
conferencing is strongly supported by commercial
LMS. Open source LMS have less built-in-features
than the commercial ones but they are open source
and easier to be developed to extend the features.
umeLMS with FMS server can provide high quality
and flexible synchronous media streaming which
can be used for live conferencing integration.
2.2.2 Content Integration
Having built up the content store with a mixture of
related hypermedia elements (i.e. lecture contents,
lecture recording, report submissions and client side
multimedia) it is required to relate different elements
for enhanced accessibility. We adopt a metadata
model to implement a semantic linking mechanism
as presented in (Hiromitsu, 2005) to relate different
elements in the LMS store.
• SCO content model
We propose a Sharable Content Model (SCO) that
can be easily modified, shared and reused to store
multimedia contents. We adopt this model, similar to
SCORM (Gord, 2004); to facilitate a high-level and
well defined content structure while keeping the
content development burden as painless a manner as
possible to the university lectures. However, in order
to keep this SCO methodology less complex, we
keep away from the Standard SCO models such as
SCORM-2004 (Victor, 2008) but using a simple
custom tool for content authoring.
• Content Authoring
Figure 4 (left side) shows the formation of SCO
script in manifest.xml. The SCO publisher in takes
different type of hypermedia inputs as shown in (I)
and generates manifest.xml file (II). Hypermedia
input in (I) is saved in the proper service location (ie.
Data Server, Web Server or Media Server).
Metadata for generating the SCO object is captured
from user behaviour, user input, and scanning the
input contents by the system. Input files which do
not generate any metadata description will all be
stored as linked assets of the course contents. In this
approach, contents corresponding to one course are
packaged in to one container with a manifest file.
• Content rendering
When a client request to access an object from Web
Server (1) , the web Server will check from data
server and get the info of that object (SCO
compliant) (2,3). After receiving the requested
information from data server (objects permission,
file info, etc) (4), web server will render the html
output, with embedded objects or hyperlinks to
contents. In case of media streaming, the web server
will pass the required information for the client to
communicate directly with the media server (6,9)
and instructs the media server to service the client
(7,8).
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Figure 4: SCO content integration.
2.2.3 Access Integration
Access integration is one of major goals of the
development of umeLMS by which the LMS
systems is open to ubiquitous access through
desktops as well as mobile devices. This is made
possible by using Flash Streaming Technology
(adobe, 2009) which is supported by almost all
internet browsers and installed virtually in all
computers irrespective of the operating system.
The Media Streaming System we use is
multimedia framework using Flash Media
Interactive Server provides the ability to stream live
videos or video on demand contents as show in
Figure 5. Nearly every device which can access the
Internet has the built-in Flash supported browser for
rich Internet contents, like PSP, iPod Touch, and
other PMP (portable music player) devices. With
Flash being widely supported by many devices,
umeLMS will gain a fully fledged ubiquitous
connectivity.
3 SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
3.1 Working environment
umeLMS Web Server is built upon a L(W)AMP
stack (which stands for Linux (or Windows),
Apache, MySQL and PHP). umeLMS Media Server
(with is powered by Flash Media Interactive Server)
is using another dedicated Linux or Windows server.
A dedicated Database server is optional, it can be
used in case of large-scale organization, in this
development stage, we use one computer to act as
both Web server and Database server for easy
control and cost efficiency.
Figure 5: Media streaming in umeLMS.
3.2 Implementation
umeLMS Web Server and umeLMS Media server
communicate with each other through a low-level
API system. When Media Server wants to connect to
the web server, it will use the web service (written in
PHP) and make an XML-RPC (Remote Procedure
Call) to request the user authenticating data. On the
other hand, when Web Server wants to make a Live
Conference through Media Server, it will request
Media Server to open live streaming service. The
client (desktops or handheld device) only need a
Flash supported browser to access Web Server,
everything will be taken care in server-side.
To maximize system efficiency as well as
compatibility for other LMS integration, we have
developed a set of APIs for umeLMS web server
which implements the modular architecture we
explained in Figure 2. Figure 6 illustrates a snap shot
of umeLMS umeLMS showing video playback and
student’s personal notes. By this way, each student
can maintain his/her own study profile.
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Figure 6: A snapshot of umeLMS showing video playback and student’s personal notes.
4 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we presented a framework for
implementing a ubiquitous multimedia enhanced
enhanced learning management system (umeLMS).
To implement this we propose SCO based content
model and a flash based multimedia framework,
with which content captured from various sources is
integrated. Due to the dominant use of multimedia in
our system, we believe 3G devices will find these
very attractive thus enabling students to actively
engage in the learning process from anywhere and at
any time. We hope our pilot run in Asia Pacific
University will be an example for other universities
to revise their learning systems.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We acknowledge here the financial support of Asia
Pacifc University internal subsidy. Support in data
gathering by Media Center of APU and advice and
comments from the English language teaching staff
of APU are also acknowledged here.
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