Content searching for e-learning applications

For e-learning to be established as a global practice new innovative means are required to increase their effectiveness. One of these is to use multimedia components instead of simple textual descriptions. In that case content searching becomes a major challenge, as different methodologies need to be incorporated for searching for multimedia components than for text strings. Other associated problems like byte size, simultaneous accessibility, spatial and temporal specifications, content design and updation times, efficiency over bandwidth sensitive networks etc. need also to be considered. This paper proposes including a multimedia database at the back-end of learning systems for handling these problems and also discusses design and implementation issues for developing the same.