Design Issues in Remote Visualization of Information in Interactive Multimedia E Learning Systems

This work deals with the most relevant aspects of the visualization of information in interactive multimedia e-learning systems and the underlying design and implementation issues for a tool to support the functionality required in these systems properly. This paper is focused on synchronous e-learning systems, but the concepts presented can be applied to many other interactive systems, such as videoconferencing, collaborative work and e-meeting systems. In these systems a slide presentation is visualized by all users, who usually work collaboratively on the presentation integrating digital ink annotations.Although there are several tools that support the visualization and real-time annotation of electronic presentations, most of them have been designed to work in local visualization environments, typically within a classroom, and few details of their design and the technologies used in their implementation have been disclosed. The main contribution of this paper is to go a step beyond local environments, considering the functionality required in remote visualization environments and providing detailed aspects of their design and implementation.