A New Multimedia Teaching Theatre for Live Distance Learning

The Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova has developed a real-time interactive platform for teleteaching, using the most modern multimedia technologies, over a wired WAN intranet. Some Department’s classrooms were staged to really become a teaching theatre: a highly interactive, multimedia classroom offering instructors many up to date and creative teaching opportunities. The core aspect of this distributed teaching theatre is the full integration of several communication channels (audio, video and data) into a digital flow, granting high quality communications among a number of remote classrooms, with a 2 Mbps bandwidth limit for each lesson being delivered, with no care about the number of connected remote site. The second main feature is the high quality streaming performance for real-time multimedia presentation and the possibility of live interaction between the teacher and the students in remote classrooms. Finally the fully open-source solution allows any equipped class-room to be used either for teaching or for attending lessons, with no need to plan the connections in advance.