WEBSEMINAR – A TOOL FOR INTERACTIVE, SEMANTICALLY PROCESSED ONLINE LIVE-LECTURES

Common webinar systems are characterized by essential deficits with regard to realize live-lectures in e-learning scenarios. These include a lack of mechanisms for supporting adequate learner-learner and learner-lecturer interaction. The latter one leads to a static one-way talk of the presenter who gets no or insufficient real-time feedback of the audience. Integrated chats can deliver a solution for this problem but needs additional effort, which increases with the number of participants, to manually filter relevant questions. Any longer, chats are inappropriate to measure general comprehension as a basis to enhance learning progresses of students during the lecture. Besides further drawbacks, which will be discussed in this contribution, we pay specific attention to the problem of wasting gathered data after the live session. Common solutions just offer an export to a static video stream that’s unsuitable to easily filter relevant information and to enable learning target-relevant access.

The presented platform-independent, HTML5-based web application WebSEMINAR integrates features to overcome the mentioned problems. Besides public and private chats, participants can anonymously create questions in a dedicated area of the tool. By community ratings, the presenter gets a real-time list of top issues that can be answered. Furthermore, polls and quizzes can be included to get precise live feedback by the audience in order to adapt the lecture based on automatically generated results. Taking into account this data (questions & answers, polls/quizzes & results) as well as uploaded media, given description and keywords of the webinar, it will be shown how semantic processing can lead to automatic embedding of the stream into fitting contents, easier finding in search engines, and automatic notification of potentially interested users within an e-learning environment. Moreover, on this foundation a semantically-labelled video for later use can be extracted. It will be shown how that can be easily transformed into an adaptive video based on Skinner’s programmed instruction and Crowder’s branched programs.