Manic Content Delivery In A Mobile Application

The University of Massachusetts Amherst RIPPLES group has developed and deployed classroom content creation/capture and delivery systems in the Multimedia Asynchronous Networked Individualized Courseware (MANIC) family for over a decade. The latest of these content delivery systems, iMANIC, is an application for the iPhone/iTouch. The iMANIC mobile platform makes the large variety of data in our complete catalog of courses, seminars, and lectures more accessible to the handheld device-wielding students of today. iMANIC flexibly delivers content from many different methods of content capture/creation, including content captured in fully instrumented classrooms, partially instrumented classroom, captured by handheld camcorders, and uploaded from earlier handcrafted multimedia and slide deck lecture presentations. The RIPPLES Group is transitioning content to the iMANIC iPhone/iTouch mobile application, and adapting the interface to the smaller screen size and other limitations of the device. We have plans to support other mobile devices in the future. Retrospective studies compared iMANIC with earlier MANIC delivery modes and evaluated iMANIC for automatically generating indexed presentations that include videos and simple PDF slide presentations.