A system for placing videotaped and digital lectures on-line

The idea of distance education, or learning at home has become very popular in recent years. Most major Universities offer classes on-line, and several smaller institutes exclusively offer distance classes. The distance courses can be offered either by mail (videotapes and books) or over the Internet (Web pages). Web-based courses are limited by bandwidth restrictions. This makes complex, interactive presentation of information virtually impossible. Videotapes are able to present complex information, however the production and distribution cost of videotapes makes the idea very prohibitive. This paper presents a system for compressing video lectures for Internet transmission, without losing classroom information. In addition, we present algorithms that improve the interactivity of the presentation by use of optical character recognition and speech recognition technologies