Migrating legacy video lectures to multimedia learning objects

Video lectures are an old distance learning approach that offers only basic interaction and retrieval features to the user. Thus, to follow the new learning paradigms, we need to re‐engineer the e‐learning processes while preserving the investments made in the past. In this paper we present an approach for migrating video lectures to multimedia learning objects. Two essential problems are tackled: the detection of slide transitions and the generation of the learning objects. To this aim, the video of the lecture is scanned to detect the slide changes, while the learning object metadata and the slide pictures are extracted from the presentation document. A tool named VLMigrator (video lecture migrator) has been developed to support the migration of video lectures and the restructuring of their contents in terms of learning objects. Both the migration strategy and the tool have been experimented in a case study. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.