SameView: A Large-Scale Real-Time Interactive E-learning System Based on TORM and AMTP

In this paper, we present the design and development of SameView, a real-time interactive E-learning system. It is designed for large-scale deployment over the Internet and provides a friendly user interface for various pedagogical activities. For efficient scalable multicast over the Internet, SameView is built on top of TORM (Totally Ordered Reliable Multicast), a transport layer multicast infrastructure exploiting a tree-based structure. Between the transport layer and upper level applications is an enhancement layer called AMTP (Adaptive Multimedia Transport Policy), an adaptive multimedia transport strategy to cope with heterogeneous network configurations. To enrich a user’s learning experience, SameView offers a multimodal human-computer interface by incorporating audio/video presentation, as well as a synchronized whiteboard for collaborative web browsing and annotation. Several enhanced features are introduced, including a live record tool which could be used to record a classroom session for later viewing.