General developer forum

Hi all, we're looking at starting development on this soon, and I was interested in getting feedback, infor if anyone has code for this, etc.

The idea is to point a camera or a microphone at a teacher, have them give their usual lecture with a slideshow, and have the voice or video streamed out to students and have a chat window for students to ask questions.

Then the whole thing is archived for later viewing.

My current working idea is along these lines: three frames or tables. In one a streaming client, we'll probably use QTSS because we have one. Below that is a chat window and next to both is a slides window. The slides will be uploaded to a server running open office at the start of the presentation, OO will convert to a series of swfs (there is already a macro for that)--alternatively we'd convert the slides to swfs in OO before uploading just before the presentation). The instructor will use their client flash movie to present the slides, this will write out to a php file the student's client flash files will check, and update the slide as neccessary.

Finally, the whole thing will be saved, the slide timings to a text file which will control the playback of the video/audio and slides. Whew.

Anyway, comments, code, offers of help, offers of mental help, pointers to free or cheap products that already do this, all welcomed.