Could we smell the cooking over the Internet? An interactive e-learning solution for home economics using synchronized multimedia

Many cooking demonstrations using videos allow only a linear playback of the process and are not effective for learning and teaching. In this paper, we demonstrate an interactive e-learning solution for cooking using synchronized multimedia techniques. Textual information and context-sensitive hyperlinks are timely displayed alongside with videos. Students can easily jump into any segment of the demonstrations to re-enforce the concepts and steps. Advanced features in Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 2.0) such as clickable video hot-spots, overlapping multimedia regions, streaming and media objects synchronization are used to enhance the effectiveness of our solution. Surely, we cannot smell the cooking process over the Internet yet, but we can do many other things using an interactive learning environment that hands-on demonstrations cannot do. Copyright © 2002 AACE.