Razvoj interaktivnih multimedijskih televizijskih učnih vsebin v okolju DVB-T

Television is a known educational device. Video enhanced television, that offers the trainee rich experience and captures student's attention, has been used in kindergartens, schools and universities. With the advent of digital television, the possibilities for learning purposes have grown. While better video quality improves the user's experience, the real opportunity lies in the interactivity between the user and the end user terminal or end user and content provider. The ELU (Enhanced learning unlimited) project focuses on the DVB-T environment, which will/is barter for current terrestrial transmission. From the educational point of view, this environment has two specific characteristics: the interaction channel is not granted and the content is not available on demand but is scheduled. In the learning environment where the learning material can not be accessed on demand adaptation of content can be done in a limited and specific way. Shows in the DVB-T environment start at a pre-scheduled time and last only as long as foreseen (the same as movies). As a result, special attention is needed for synchronisation of the interactive and video content in the programme. For learning purposes, we developed interactive content templates such as various games and more generic Multimedia pages that can be delivered to all end users regardless of the interaction channel. Our interactive learning templates are fine tuned through the developed software that enables to prepare a personalised content that can be synchronised with the A/V stream. An exemplary pedagogical element that includes adaptation of the user content and also relates to the time can be seen in Figure 2. The content in the authoring tools is prepared in two steps. In both steps, configuration files based on XML are used to configure pre-prepared MHP applications (Figure 1). The first type of the script files are configurations for the template, or, in other words, what is displayed on the screen. The second type of the configuration file is the so called script file where we define events and their triggers. The trigger can be either a time stamp, a condition or a combination of both. The main advantage of the developed concept is its modular architecture (Figure 3). By using the authoring tools, we create only script files that are platform independent. With the transition to another middleware platform, only parts of the applications have to be rewritten. By using the authoring tools an interactive learning course, i.e. 'Development of traffic skills', was built. The course was broadcasted to users in the laboratory environment using advanced equipment (Table 1).