Purpose: Previous research examined the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) in various fields including engineering (Alhalabi, 2016), the military (Webster, 2016), robotic surgery (Bric et al., 2016; Francis et al., 2020), firefighters (Çakiroglu and Gökoglu, 2019), negotiation training (Ding et al., 2020), health-care training (Chow et al.,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to outline a hierarchical model for developing essential e-textbook functionality and to offer important insight for e-textbook designers. Design/methodology/approach: Guided by the SAMR model, five hierarchical functional layers are proposed in the development process for e-textbook to enable more effective…

Cooperative knowledge spaces create new potentials for the experimental fields in natural sciences and engineering because they enhance the accessibility of experimental setups through virtual laboratories and remote technology, opening them for collaborative and distributed usage. A concept for extending existing virtual knowledge spaces for the…

Lecture recording provides learning material for local and distance education. The TeleTeachingTool uses the very flexible screen recording technique to capture virtually any material displayed during a presentation. With its built-in annotation system teachers can add freehand notes and emphasize important parts. Unlike other screen recorders,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the case of synchronized multimedia presentations. Design/methodology/approach: The proposal is based on SMIL as composition language. Particularly, the paper reuses and customizes the SMIL template used by INRIA on their technical presentations. It also proposes a set of free tools to produce…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce some new functions achieved in a web-based multimedia courseware, which is developed by Flash software and used by part-time graduate students. Design/methodology/approach: The courseware uses Adobe Flash CS3 as its development software, which supports Actionscript language, FMS and FLV technology…

Collaborative learning with recorded lectures and presentations can be supported by allowing users to anchor notes in the documents and exchange them with other learners. While the traditional modality for annotation and discussion is text, there are a number of reasons in favour of supporting other media and modalities as well. We describe the…

The need for designing the next generation of web service-based educational systems with the ability of integrating components from different tools and platforms is now recognised as the major challenge in advanced learning technologies. In this paper, we discuss this issue and we present the conceptual design of such environment, referred to as…

One of today's major problems in the field of e-learning is that the creation of high-quality content is still rather time consuming and expensive. In the past, many efforts have been made to produce educational content on the fly, but the results were mainly static blocks of recorded lecture lacking sophisticated navigation facilities. Facing…

Despite some spectacular e-learning failures in recent years, e.g. the British government's "e University", educational technologies have continued developing and have made advances in several learning paradigms. These new learning paradigms appear as new ways to deal with the old traditional learning concepts and philosophies throughout…

Distance education has been an important research issue of multimedia computing and communication. Since the instructional activities are implemented on cyberspace, how to control behaviors of students and to increase the degree of communication awareness have been a challenging issue. We propose a system based on the scaffolding theory. Behaviors…