Multimedia learning objects framework for e-learning

With the growing interest in flexible and blended education, the usage of recorded lecture videos as a part of learning material, is becoming an everyday activity in most of the higher education institutions. Flexible education provides students with the opportunity to select how, when, and where to study compared to ordinary on-campus education. Additionally, lecture videos contain most of the instructional content. The content of these videos are in general non-scripted and unedited, and thus do not provide the required level of interactivity. Therefore, these videos fail to captivate students' attention for a long time, and thus their effective use remains a challenge. In this regard, Multimedia Learning Object (MLO) can play an important role in future flexible education. MLOs are media rich documents that have pedagogical values encapsulated with all needed features such as navigation structures and surrogates. We propose in this paper a framework for interactive MLOs in distance and blended education. The framework supports creation, storage, distribution, and evaluation of automatically extracted learning objects from digital media. The framework not only conforms to industry standards, but also provide novel methods and techniques to develop Video Learning Objects (VLOs).