Integrating Smart Classroom and Language Services

The real-time interactive virtual classroom with tele-education experience is an important approach in distance learning. However, most current systems fail to meet the new challenges raised by the development of the serviceoriented architecture. First, the learning systems should be able to facilitate easier integration of increasingly dedicated services, such as language services on the Internet. Second, the learning systems must open their internal interfaces as web services to other systems, so as to enable deeper integration of these systems and easier deployment. Third, the systems are expected to provide flexible interfaces to support mobile device interaction. To address these issues, we build a prototype system, called Open Smart Classroom, by upgrading the original Smart Classroom into a service-oriented open system. With the help of Language Grid services, two Open Smart Classrooms deployed in Tsinghua University and Kyoto University are connected and experimental co-classes have been successfully held. The results of the user study show that integrating Smart Classroom and language services is an interesting and promising approach to building future multicultural distant learning systems.