Sharing Web-based multimedia learning objects using NNTP news architecture

This paper presents a multimedia objects sharing framework on the basis of Internet news infrastructure (NNTP) to facilitate e-learning content access and distribution. Through this framework, a Web-based e-learning system can publish sharable learning objects by posting them to a news server nearby, so that the objects can be automatically spread to world-wide news servers through NNTP forwarding mechanism. Instead of hunting for the desired materials from many different e-learning systems, users can access learning objects shared from different e-learning platforms easily, and in a unified way. Moreover, we deal with severe data redundancy problem occurring especially when the shared object contains multimedia data (e.g., instructor´s speech, image, and video). A system prototype has been implemented in our university to share English lectures with others.