DEDICATED - LEARNING ON NETWORKED MULTIMEDIA PLATFORMS

The development of a distributed and heterogeneous generic multimedia learning environment presents many issues. The hardware, software and network platforms are heterogeneous, so device-independence and interoperability are vital. Therefore, the primary objective of the research presented here is to introduce and to specify a generic learning architecture, including communication mechanisms and multimedia features. This architecture provides application-independent functionality in the areas of transfer, processing, storage, presentation and interaction, and allows the development of distributed learning applications in a great variety of fields (such as Scientific Visualisation, CAD, Rendering) [1]. In addition, co-operation and timing control paradigms must be introduced to allow real-time communication and remote access; such features are termed Tele-Media (telecommunicating multimedia) [2, 3].