Web-Based Synchronized Multimedia Lecturing

Abstract

Over the last decade, the emerging Web technologies have opened a new era for distance education, where online courses can be created and accessed in a very easy way not previously available. Many online courses based on HTML pages thus are now available in cyberspace for synchronous or asynchronous distance learning (Anderson, Beavers, VanDeGrift, & Videon, 2003; Gregory, 1999; Muller & Ottmann, 2000; Shi et al., 2003; Siddiqui & Zubairi, 2000). However, without the support of multimedia, the static HTML pages can only serve as different kinds of simple “dumb” lecture notes on a network. Thus most students may lose interest quickly and eventually give up self-learning (Zimmer, 2003). Furthermore, this kind of unguided, static HTML pages are clearly insufficient for diverse learning needs and for different knowledge domains. With the dramatic development of multimedia technologies, we can integrate various media and provide students with vivid multimedia lectures on the Web. For example, the presentation techniques of online language courses should stress the importance of multimedia (e.g., voice and video) and document interaction flexibility (e.g., random access and repeated play of a specific speech segment) much more than other courses do (Brett, 1998; McLoughlin, Hutchinson, & Koplin, 2002).