Reasoning about eLearning Multimedia Objects ?

The advancement of hypermedia technologies led teachers and learners to a daily use of multimedia components. Media bricks in educational content management have evolved into IEEE LOM eLearning Objects, which combine content with an expressive set of metadata and are structured by a variety of named relations. Such ”eLOs” are nicely suited for self-explorative learning within adaptive hypermedia applications, but force authors not only into content editing, but the provisioning of meta descriptors and numerous inter–object relations. This paper reports on our ongoing activities to semi–automatically generate eLearning Objects from classroom recordings, to harvest metadata from context and content analysis and to generate a dense semantic net between eLOs based on extended LOM relations. Special focus is drawn on the processing of recorded speech and an Ontological Evaluation Layer for an autonomous derivation of object relations. These solutions have been implemented in the Hypermedia Learning Objects System (hylOs), our prototype of an eLearning content management system. hyLOs is built upon the more general Media Information Repository (MIR) and the MIR adaptive context linking environment (MIRaCLE), its linking extension. MIR is an open system supporting the standard XML, CORBA and JNDI. hyLOs benefits from manageable information structures, sophisticated access logic and high-level authoring tools like the WYSIWYG XML editor and the Instructional Designer.