Abstract:

Instructors and teachers are facing new challenges as the amount of devices capable of consuming multimedia is growing. All kind of end user devices has one thing in common: they are all different! In order to provide a multimedia framework that cope with this situation. The ISO standard MPEG 21 help content providers to distribute content and deliver optimized learning experiences across in-homogenous networks to a range of devices.

This paper describes the main components of a new advanced, highly scalable platform that take care of all aspects of rich media content production, content sharing, and delivering of rich media content across the platform to all types of mobile handheld devices, PCs and laptops. The prototype platform will be available in 2009. Instructors, teacher or students may upload content in any format to the media server, from portable high-end live media production units, low-end mobile handheld units like cell phones, as well as existing third party systems. The distribution server recognises, validates, and provides adapted video quality to end-users that use various formats, terminals and delivery platforms. The end-user will consist of other students, instructors or teachers.

Thus, the platform provides instructors and teachers in vocational education with new services that provide optimized production and distribution of video content in parallel to various types of end-user devices. The media server will detect which device the end-user is using, and adapt and optimize the video stream to each single device. What is even more important, the platform provides significantly better technical video quality than the latest version of YouTube.

From a pedagogical point of view, this means that instructors and teachers may start using new pedagogical methods where students actually use the live multimedia production unit as a facilitator in for instance problem based teaching and learning methods. The learning process may considerably change. A student group may for instance use their cell phones or video cameras to record video as part of solving exercises and tasks in class or skills upgrading processes, and afterwards share it in a time efficient way with the other students as reusable learning objects. Thus, the students may participate actively in the production and sharing of new, dedicated educational content, whereby their role switches from (passive) consumers to active participation where they may capture, upload and automatically store video based educational learning resources. It should be noticed that descriptive metadata might be tagged to the content, whereby external systems that understand standard-based metadata may use the metadata information from the platform directly.

At the end the paper outlines how the new streaming platform in combination with the development of new pedagogical methods, improve skills upgrading process in mechanical industry in general, and for in-company training in particular. A blended learning and training approach is used, mixing onsite training, e-learning and video based learning resources. The platform is currently being tested in vocational training in Norway. Experiences from these tests will be included.

Keywords:

video, video streaming, mechanical industry, welding, activity based training, workplace learning.