Recent development of streaming media technologies in Industry has brought great opportunities for improving the quality of distance education through the Internet. With streaming media technologies, virtual classrooms with audio and video as major media contents become more and more popular.
This thesis applies Windows streaming media technologies to distance education. A set of authoring tools that are suitable for web-based presentation have been developed on the platform of Windows Media Service 4.0. Both live streaming and on-demand media productions are supported. For live streaming, a model is presented to implement virtual classrooms presentation of audio and web-based text/graphics materials. A user-friendly application is designed to implement real-time media contents play-list control, while another is designed for lecturers to give presentations. Server-side switching is used to achieve the automatic switching between the lecture stream and background music/commercial stream.
Moreover, script command technology is explored to improve the interactivity between the lecturer and the media contents. With a specially designed web page, the Internet clients can view auto-refreshed slides and lecturer-guided slide highlights, which are synchronized with lecture audio, and interaction with Java Applets running on the web page.