Parametric evaluation of progressively immersive multimedia representations for teaching environment in eLearning

Abstract

Live eLearning systems present multimedia elements constituting the teaching environment, such as - teacher, teaching aids, in various ways creating virtual representations. Often, teacher’s video and screencast of the teaching material are streamed and displayed as mutually exclusive disconnected entities. Though the existing eLearning systems give a clear view of the screen and the instructor delivering the lecture, they break the spatial connection between teacher’s gestures and content on the screen. In this paper, we identify five perception parameters that influence visual perception of the teaching environment. We introduce new multimedia based representations that circumvent shortcomings of current approaches and provide a spatially coherent view mimicking the real world classroom scenario. By improving the perception parameters, we arrange the representations in a stepwise hierarchy that progressively moves towards an immersive teaching environment. We then present a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of various representations based on these parameters. Finally, we present a user study to substantiate our findings. Results indicate significant enhancement in classroom experience with proposed new representations.