Paola Salomoni
Silvia Mirri
Abstract
The large diffusion of e-learning technologies represents a great opportunity for underserved segments of population. This is particularly true for people with disabilities for whom digital barriers should be overstepped with the aim of reengaging them back into society to education. In essence, before a mass of learners can be engaged in a collective educational process, each single member should be put in the position to enjoy accessible and customized educational experiences, regardless of the wide diversity of their personal characteristics and technological equipment. To respond to this demand, we developed LOT (Learning Object Transcoder), a distributed PHP-based service-oriented system designed to deliver flexible and customized educational services for a multitude of learners, each with his/her own diverse preferences and needs. The main novelty of LOT amounts to a broking service able to manage the transcoding activities needed to convert multimedia digital material into the form which better fits a given student profile. Transcoding activities are performed based on the use of Web service technologies. Experimental results gathered from several field trials with LOT (available online at http://137.204.74.83/∼lot/) have confirmed the viability of our approach.
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Index Terms
- A multimedia broker to support accessible and mobile learning through learning objects adaptation
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Reviews
Jean-Noel Colin
All e-learners should have accessible and customized educational experiences, regardless of their wide diversity and the equipment they use. To this end, the paper presents a model, together with its implementation, to generate on-the-fly digital content that has been adapted?that is, recoded?based on some characteristics of the end user. The approach is rather simple: based on a set of profile criteria, digital content is recoded according to the user's abilities and equipment. For performance reasons, it uses a broker architecture that orchestrates Web services to perform all recoding operations in parallel. I would be curious to see how the proposed model expands to more sophisticated user profiling that goes beyond the simple elements described in the paper. For instance, the iClass research project (http://www.iclass.info) goes far beyond, in terms of user profiling and providing personalized content. The system could also benefit from using a service directory from which to pick the services to be run to recode data. Some performance figures are provided, but they do not cover the full project; it would be good to have an overall performance assessment with many different users, with different profiles accessing different content. Overall, this is a nice paper that offers interesting areas for further research. It is written in a clear style and it's easy to read. Online Computing Reviews Service
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