The Internet was made for education. It has the capability to provide multimedia information to millions of users all around the world in a matter of seconds. What better way to leverage your products than to do an interactive presentation delivered over the Web? With the Internet capabilities of the AS/400 and a little World Wide Web expertise, you can produce interactive education that reaches audiences worldwide. Additionally, you can deploy the same technology over a corporate intranet to transfer skills throughout the enterprise. (To see some examples of interactive Web education, point your browser to http://www.softmall.ibm.com/as400/ebiz/courses.html.)

The first thing you need to do is decide which components will make up your course. A good starting point is a multimedia presentation with an interactive quiz at the end. The multimedia presentation is a series of HTML pages (slides) with audio or audio and video voice-overs. Additionally, you may want to have a glossary, a Q & A session, and labs, depending on the topic and how much development time you have. This document focuses primarily on the hard part—the multimedia presentation. This intermediate-level discussion assumes some HTML expertise.

Hardware Requirements

You need an AS/400 with V3R2 or higher to put this kind of education on the Internet or on your company intranet. You may also need a newer, high-power server model and a high-bandwidth Internet connection if you are expecting large numbers of simultaneous users.

To produce the multimedia presentation, you need some inexpensive PC hardware and some production software. On the hardware side, you need a sound card, a microphone, a video camera, and a video capture board. The microphone should be a dynamic cardioid type (unpowered directional); the best kind for this purpose is a professional, low-impedance balanced microphone. The microphones that come with

multimedia computers are almost always unacceptable, but, if you have one, you might want to try it anyway.

Any reasonably good video camera should work, but those with s-video or color component outputs may work better. For the capture board, look for one with s-video or color component inputs (if your camera does not have these outputs, this may not be a factor). You should look for an M-JPEG (real-time compression) capture board, as these tend to produce pretty good video without massive storage requirements.

Software Requirements

For software, you need both sound editing and video editing applications. The sound recorder that you may have with your operating system may work, but you will not have the advanced filtering and editing capabilities you would get with a product like CoolEdit by Syntrillium Software Corporation. For video, you may get some reasonably good software with the board, but the best way to go is to get Adobe Premier. Additionally, if your software doesn’t support RealVideo and RealAudio, you will need to download the compression software from the Real Networks Web site at http://www.real.com.

Design Strategies

Because video production is much more time-intensive than sound-only recording, you should consider doing only small portions of your presentation in video; do the rest with slides and voice-overs.

When you do your video recording, be sure to have good lighting and a dark backdrop. Remember that the video will be compressed eventually, so high contrast is a good thing. For your sound-only recording, work in an environment free from external noises or echo. If possible, avoid using a tape recorder, as these introduce extra noise. Plug your microphone directly into your sound card and record right on your PC.

In delivering the multimedia presentation (arguably the most important part), you must address several concerns. The first is the limited bandwidth of the Internet. Digital audio and video have extremely high bit rates compared to text information, and many users access the Internet with modems (usually 28.8 Kbps or less); expecting the user to spend hours waiting for each page to download is clearly unacceptable.

To alleviate this problem, you must use two techniques in conjunction: compression and streaming. Compression actually lowers the bit rate of the multimedia content, and streaming allows the user to play the clip as it downloads. When these are used in conjunction, a user on a 28.8 Kbps modem will have to wait only about five seconds on every page before the audio/video clip begins. When adjusting the compression settings on the RealVideo/RealAudio compression software, be conservative. Even if the majority of your audience has a 28.8 Kbps or better Internet connection, use the 14.4 Kbps setting anyway, because many users become annoyed when “rebuffering” occurs (when the actual bit rate is lower than the expected bit rate, the clip will stop for a second or two).

AS/400 Configuration

You must configure your AS/400 to serve the multimedia content. Under V4R1, this step is easy. Just use a Web browser and type the URL http://myas400:2001 (where myas400 refers to either the domain name or the IP address of your company’s AS/400). Figure 1 shows Netscape’s presentation of the Internet Connection Server for the AS/400 browser application from which you can update the AS/400’s configuration. Select the “general” instance, and go to content types.

Add the following MIME types (all binary), and then be sure to restart the HTTP server to make the changes go into effect. These MIME types are passed from the server to the Web browser when the page is downloaded, causing the RealPlayer to be started.

.ra x-pn-realaudio
.rm x-pn-realaudio
.rpm x-pn-realaudio-plugin

For more information on AS/400 Internet Connection Server configuration, see the AS/400 Webmaster’s guide at http://www.as400. ibm.com/tstudio/workshop/ webbuild.htm.

You will want to include graphics in your presentation for illustrative purposes. Be sure to make them small (in terms of file size) to ensure that the page they’re on loads quickly. Generally (not always), this means making them physically smaller. Many of your users will probably be using low-resolution screens, anyway, so you should try to keep them under 600x380 pixels.

HTML Specifics

Now that you know what should go into your presentation, you are ready to start producing it. A good starting point is to produce HTML pages named according to their position in the presentation sequence. Once you have produced your HTML pages, you need to produce your voice-overs and link them to it.

You may have noticed in the server configuration that there were three entries for only two physical content types (audio and video with audio). The third entry is for metafiles. A metafile is the file that the HTML actually references on a particular page. Every audio or video clip must have a discrete metafile containing the absolute URL of that clip. The Web browser downloads the HTML page, and, when it hits the EMBED tag, it passes the embedded object (in this case, the metafile) to the RealPlayer plugin, which reads the metafile and requests the audio/video clip referenced by that metafile. It is possible to embed the audio/video clip directly, but the clips will need to download completely before playing.

The HTML syntax for embedding the metafile depends on whether it is audio or video.

You may want to vary the parameters to meet your needs, but here is my suggestion.

For audio only, use this:

WIDTH=40 HEIGHT=32>

For audio and video, use this:

CONTROLS=ImageWindow>

Now that you have a bunch of HTML pages, each with a video or audio clip, you need to link them together. I recommend using frames for navigation, making the placement of the Forward and Previous buttons consistent throughout.

The disadvantage of putting the Forward and Previous buttons in a separate frame is that you will need a separate “frameset” HTML file and “bottom” HTML file for every page in your presentation.

You also will want to have the script for each media clip written out in text form. This technique is a major usability enhancement and is well worth the extra work. I recommend putting the text in a window that pops up when the user clicks on a button. This avoids clutter for those who do not want to see the text all the time. The syntax for this is a JavaScript function, shown in Figure 2.

JavaScript can be used in other ways to enhance your presentation, for example, Figure 3 contains the code for a basic pop quiz.

If you are deploying this site over the public Internet, you need to be concerned about corporate firewalls. We’re using HTTP to deliver the multimedia content, so if the users can view ordinary Web pages, they should be able to view and hear this material. Standard proxy servers are no problem at all.

The only problem arises when the Web browser is using an internal SOCKS client to bypass the firewall. The RealPlayer does not have a SOCKS client and can’t use the Web browser’s. In this case, the user must “SOCKS-ify” his IP stack. There is a freeware
.dll available that will do exactly this; it’s available from Hummingbird Communications Ltd. at http://www.hummingbird.com.

Just add content and stir.…

Although the initial setup will be fairly extensive, once you have the right equipment and software set up, you can produce multimedia education to be delivered over the Internet with minimal cost. If you already have an AS/400 set up as a Web server on the Internet, all you need to do to deliver content-rich multimedia presentations across the world is content development, some multimedia production, and some HTML/JavaScript work.

Figure 1: Internet Connection Server for the AS/400

--> 

An Example of Usage
Click Me

Figure 2: The JavaScript function

--> 


How many pairs of socks did Einstein wear at a time?
A. Zero
B. One
C. Two



Security

Figure 3: A JavaScript pop quiz

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