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(part of) their traditional TV content through the
Web. Producing and distributing (video) content
through the web is getting easier and easier, even
though there are still a number of open issues.
This fact boosts several research streams, rang-
ing from assuring quality of service to indexing
and extracting knowledge from videos, to usability
concerns, to the many new applications that can
be invented by using this new media combination.
Among the possible applications, those in
learning are certainly very interesting. Actually
the field of e-learning has been a precursor in us-
ing the videos over the Internet. There is in fact
little doubt that education in all its forms, but
especially in the field of lifelong learning where
just-in-time services might be important, will
continue taking advantage from this technology.
There is in fact an evident trend in the evolution of
our society that strongly changes the paradigms of
the previous millennia. In the past, learning could
be mostly concentrated in the early stages of life.
Once one learned a job, the acquired knowledge
was sufficient for the rest of the life. In today's
society this is no longer true. It is quite obvious
in the technological arena, where knowledge
obsolescence is quite rapid: in the computer sci-
ence field, for instance, the known paradigms can
radically change within a very short time span.
This trend however is general, and all sectors are
affected by it. Hence the ability to update one
owns knowledge becomes vital to survive in the
job market. The need of continuous education and
lifelong learning permeate our society, and it will
be always more so. Training on the job, just in
time training and education update need to find
their way into our life. Informal education and
the ability to autonomously find and use suitable
educational resources will play an important role
in this scenario. In this setting, the availability
of multimedia-carried educational content is an
exceptionally powerful asset.
Today we see a flowering of education-related
initiatives ranging from producing podcasts (i.e.
audio-streams) and webcasts (i.e. synchronized
slide shows + audio) to recording “live” lectures,
to producing “how-to” You Tube videos. In recent
years several custom made systems aimed at sup-
porting the process of acquiring and distributing
video lectures have been developed: some were
commercialized, some were put into the public
domain, and some others were used locally as
prototypes. Each of these systems has a slightly
different twist, and some implement new clever
ideas to respond to the peculiar needs that may
arise in different situations. A review of the re-
quirements for such systems has been compiled
by Ronchetti (2008).
In this chapter we shall first briefly review
the pioneering ideas, then we shall discuss the
pedagogical soundness of the idea of using videos
over Internet for teaching and learning. Then we
will review the various directions that research
has taken over the last 10 years. We shall not at-
tempt to provide an exhaustive review, but rather
we shall try to highlight the ideas and the trends.
BACKGROUND
The possibility of using digital video for distance
education was envisioned already 15 years ago
when F. Tobagi (1995) built in Stanford a proto-
typical architecture for distributing digital video
lectures. Although using (analogical) video for
recording lectures had been in use for more than
a decade, the digital approach was obviously
superior in terms of ease of distribution of the
didactic material, asynchronous and multiple
simultaneous accesses. Moreover it was promis-
ing in terms of possibility for cross-referencing
of learning resources.
The first report of actual deployment of an
application of video-streaming to teaching we
are aware of dates back to 1998 (Hayes). At that
time, the main goal was to substitute a VHS based
system for delivering lectures to a geographically
remote place (from USA to France) with a digital
alternative. At the beginning it was limited to
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