A software audio terminal for interactive communications in Web-based educational environments over the Internet

Abstract

This paper describes the software architecture of a multimedia educational tool which is suitable for delivering educational material over the World Wide Web under the different forms of HTML slides, digitized video-taped lessons, interactive and adaptive exercises and quizzes to solve, and real time synchronized audio. Such one Web-based educational tool embodies a software audio terminal that allows its users to conduct full-duplex, real time interactive audio conversations across the Internet. The authors discuss the main design issues of that audio terminal and report on several real-world experiments carried out over Internet connections that confirm the efficacy of the strategies they have adopted.