Tutor-Sky: A web environment for multimedia on-line education

Abstract

Computer Science and Telecommunication technologies are being more and more integrated in teaching and learning systems. The subsequent modification of the educational world becomes a natural event towards a student who is immersed in a multimedia technological society and expects to find a similar learning environment. At present, multimedia is widely used in education to improve and integrate the learning processes and is ever more used in on-line education where the different media help in re-creating the “natural” interaction between teachers and students. There are many tools that allow creation and publication on web of learning contents, but none of them allows teachers to easily and flexibly create a complete learning environment and add all the needed multimedia contents (e.g., audio and video) whereas students are provided with full flexibility in choosing what, when and how to learn. This work presents the conceptual and implementation details of a web environment, Tutor-Sky, which tries to answer to all the requirements for efficient, flexible and integrated multimedia on-line education. Tutor-Sky on one hand allows the teacher to easily insert and structure multimedia contents in order to create an on-line course (or just an on-line lecture) and on the other hand allows the student to flexibly organize and customize learning paths through the choice of contents, media and learning environments. Tutor-Sky will be here discussed in terms of its objectives, architecture and main implementation characteristics. Moreover, some examples of usage will be shown both from the teacher’s and the student’s points of view.