Testbed for Measuring Multimedia Presentation Quality Disorders in Courseware

Recent developments in distributed multimedia courseware technology and in the integration of a variety of media have the potential to change the nature of dissemination of learning material. The capability to deliver continuous media to the workstation and meet its real-time processing requirements is now recognised as the central element of future distributed multimedia courseware. In this process, user perception of quality of service plays an important role. Commonly, the quality of service (QoS) is expressed as a set of quantitative and qualitative parameters (media dimensions) that a multimedia presentation has to meet. Since people have different expectations we concluded that it is important to ensure that the courseware package meets the user perceived QoS rather than commonly defined QoS parameters. In order to investigate this hypothesis further, we have constructed a multi-agent system (MAT system) for integrated management of resource distribution. In MAT, the QoS is managed as one composite value — the user satisfaction with the quality of a multimedia presentation. In this paper, we present the overview of the MAT architecture. In addition, we discuss the case study overview in which the MAT is being used to assess the impact of the quality of presentation decline from the perceived QoS on student's learning process.