WEB STANDARD TECHNOLOGIES

Web standard technologies in a Higher Education environment

Web standard technologies in a Higher Education environment

Introduction

As educational institutions strive to provide an increasing range of learning experiences to a growing audience, the effective use of technology becomes ever more important. From the use of data projectors, to networked services such as on-line journal archives, computer technology has enhanced every aspect of study in the 21st century.

The widespread availability of the Internet has allowed students unprecedented access to teaching material. This has been particularly important for parttime and distance learning students. While the Internet provides the basic infrastructure for connection, it is the World Wide Web (commonly referred to as 'the Web') that has been the driving force behind advances in academic information exchange and delivery.

Designed as 'a shared information space through which people (and machines) could communicate', the Web provides new opportunities for delivering quality educational content. It achieves this is through the use of open standards which ensure that anyone can have access regardless of platform.

Teaching materials such as lecture slides, handouts and other documents can only provide part of the learning experience. Universities are now looking to provide even more through the introduction of video conferencing and on-demand digital lectures. Of particular interest are multimedia presentations that combine recorded audio or video of live lectures synchronised with digital slides. These presentations, which I will refer to as 'recorded presentations' or 'recorded lectures' offer new means of accessing learning resources. With such a system a student can move to a specific section of a lecture and get the slide content along with the relevant audio or video commentary. Lectures can be indexed and archived for quick retrieval of specific information.

Many of the solutions available today for producing and accessing recorded presentations are based upon proprietary systems. This paper details an investigation into producing an open alternative based upon standard Web technologies and outlines a proposed solution and prototype implementation.

Aims and objectives of the study

The aim of this project was to investigate whether Web standard technologies defined by W3C can be sufficiently utilised to produce recorded presentations for use in a Higher Education environment.

This paper identifies standard web technologies, and combinations thereof, that are suitable for this purpose, including existing work in this area. The comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of these technologies and approaches provide the basis for the proposed solution.

The core goals for the project were:

• Enable the creation and delivery of a recorded presentation.

• Such a presentation should have a high degree of playback control, with the ability to jump to either arbitrary or specific points in the timeline.

• Accessibility features, such as those for users with visual/hearing impairments, should be built into the system.

• Provide a semantically rich means of describing the presentation content.

• Offer different representations of the same presentation such as notes, outlines, static slides and the recorded session.

W3C Web standards

The Web is an Internet application built upon three main technologies. Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) for addressing and identification, the HyperText Transfer Protocol ...