Guest editorial: Multimedia technologies for e-learning (special issue of ITSE journal)

Abstract

Education is one of the most important application areas for multimedia technologies. Universities and other educational institutions enhance their educational portfolio by using new technologies. Video and audio capture of lectures has become a common practice to produce e-learning content. Simulations allow to explore experiments which would be too expensive or too dangerous to be conducted physically by students. Multimedia-powered demonstrations are freed from many physical restrictions such as the availability of an object to study or the timescale of an effect to observe. Teaching enriched by vivid presentations and possibilities for interaction for students can also gain from improved learner’s motivation. Concepts may be realized in a demonstration and the observability of important details can be augmented. With the present amount of produced educational data, there is a high demand in techniques and methods capable of handling multimedia contents adequately. Educational content has to be presented, deployed, stored, navigated, searched, retrieved, edited, combined, and reused in a proper way. Furthermore, quality control and learning processes with feedback loops are considered to be important concepts for more effective and sustainable e-learning solutions. Multimedia technologies facilitate the evaluation, improvement, and assurance of quality in loopback controlled e-learning processes. Most of these topics involve techniques from artificial intelligence, computer vision, and multimedia, but also human computer interaction, educational science, and psychology. The Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning was held in San Diego, California in December 2009 and brought experts from these respective fields together. The workshop program consisted of two sessions. Seven papers were presented in total in both sessions (Brdiczka et al., 2009). The articles of this special issue of Interactive Technology and Smart Education are the revised and significantly extended versions of outstanding papers presented at the MTEL 2009 workshop.