Turning Web Lectures into User Generated Adaptive Multimedia Robert Mertens Fraunhofer IAIS, Schloß Birlinghoven, 53754 Sankt Augustin Germany Email: robert.mertens@iais.fraunhofer.de Markus Ketterl Virtual Teaching Support Center, University of Osnabrück, Heger-Tor-Wall 12, 49074 Osnabrück, Germany Email: markus.ketterl@uni-osnabrueck.de Oliver Vornberger Dept. of Computer Science, University of Osnabrück, Albrechtstrasse 28, 49069 Osnabrück Germany Email: oliver@uni-osnabrueck.de Abstract Adaptive Hypermedia bring a major benefit of traditional face to face teaching to electronic media in that they allow to custom tailor the way in which one media object is delivered to different users. While the creation of Adaptive Hypermedia is a highly labor intensive process for text based media, creating adaptive multimedia documents poses nearly insurmountable obstacles. This is mainly due to the fact that creating and editing multimedia documents requires considerably more effort then the creation of text based documents. However, recently more and more universities have begun to make video lectures publicly available. Community efforts like the Opencast project aim at standardizing video lecture formats, making re-use of content from different institutions possible. Involving end users can decrease per capita workload by involving learners in media creation. This paper describes a basic technology framework that empowers end users to create adaptive multimedia documents by merging parts from different sources. 1. Introduction Adaptive Hypermedia differ from conventional hypermedia in that content presentation can be adapted to the user [3]. A popular application scenario for Adaptive Hypermedia in eLearning is custom tailoring the content presented to the users’ level of understanding. This way users who visit the same node in a hyperdocument can view two totally different versions of that node. Each user is presented exactly with the content that explains the content of that node in a way that is suited best to the students current level of understanding [13] or learning style [5]. The approach presented in this paper shows that these advantages can also be applied to multimedia learning documents. To these ends a prototype player component for adaptive web lectures is introduced. This paper does not focus on learner modeling, hence adaptivity in the player is not achieved by a complex user model but by a manual adjustment function. However, the paper tackles the problem of authoring for adaptive media which has shown to be the main reason why Adaptive Hypermedia is not as common as one would expect [4]. The adaptive multimedia player introduced in this paper is based on the virtPresenter web lecture player which is used in the Opencast project, an initiative of more then 250 institutions aiming at the collective use of web lectures an podcasts. This opens up the possibility of re-using multimedia content from many institutions as a source for creating adaptive multimedia documents. Another problem with generating adaptive multimedia documents in contrast to Adaptive Hypermedia documents arises from the fact that editing multimedia documents is far more labor intensive than editing text documents. In order to tackle both problems, the approach presented in this paper employs a web 2.0 strategy by empowering end users to create adaptive