Turning Web Lectures into User Generated Adaptive Multimedia

Adaptive hypermedia bring a major benefit of traditional face to face teaching to electronic media in that they allow to custom tailor the way in which one media object is delivered to different users. While the creation of adaptive hypermedia is a highly labor intensive process for text based media, creating adaptive multimedia documents poses nearly insurmountable obstacles. This is mainly due to the fact that creating and editing multimedia documents requires considerably more effort then the creation of text based documents. However, recently more and more universities have begun to make video lectures publicly available. Community efforts like the Opencast project aim at standardizing video lecture formats, making re-use of content from different institutions possible. Involving end users can decrease per capita workload by involving learners in media creation. This paper describes a basic technology framework that empowers end users to create adaptive multimedia documents by merging parts from different sources.