The MOCA (Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture) suite of tools was developed to facilitate online collaboration and distance learning. It includes tools for synchronous collaboration like shared whiteboarding and chat, as well as asynchronous tools for multimedia presentations, surveys, homework, and project management. The tools are being used in an advanced chip design course involving collaboration between teams at universities and companies. MOCA is built using standard Java technologies and allows real-time collaboration between distributed student groups.

1. The Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture:
Tools to Enable Distance Learning
J. Peden, W. Burleson, C. Leonardo
Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Amherst, Massachusetts 01003 USA
burleson@ecs.umass.edu
ABSTRACT
MOCA is a suite of Internet multimedia tools to facilitate group-
work in a distance-learning environment, built using standard
Java utilities. MOCA’s original aim was to allow several users
to work simultaneously on multimedia documents using a
multimedia whiteboard. But now MOCA supports both
asynchronous and synchronous collaboration models. Tools for
asynchronous multimedia presentation, annotation, surveys, and
HW have also been developed using the same basic framework.
To enable synchronous collaboration sessions between students,
TAs and instructors, we have developed a scheduler tool. The
system is being piloted in an advanced VLSI chip design course
which allows multimedia collaboration between design teams
distributed at academic sites at UMASS/Amherst, ENST/Paris,
Pusan South Korea and industrial sites at IBM, Intel, AMD and
Motorola.
1. INTRODUCTION
Development of the Multimedia Online Collaboration
Architecture began as an effort to create software that would
facilitate an abstraction of traditional "Office Hours" meetings
between students and professors in an online environment. This
was originally meant to allow students taking courses via pre-
recorded videotape and DVD-based lectures to have a higher
level of interaction with the professor or TA of a course.
Currently, the most widely used method of communication in
such a situation is electronic mail. In order to provide a richer
and more interactive means for this type of communication, it
was decided that a combination of a shared-whiteboard tool and
text-based chat would be an ideal solution.
Many individual tools for text-based chat and shared-
whiteboards were examined, however, none of these tools could
be integrated tightly enough to give an efficient solution.
Development began on the two tools with the initial
requirements of supporting online office hours. However,
during the development of the prototype version of MOCA, it
became evident that these tools, while helpful in a one-to-one
student-teacher communications scenario, also had great
potential for aiding interaction between groups of students.
This evolution of MOCA has led the project to where it is today.
Currently, we are further developing the two aforementioned
collaborative tools with an emphasis on student-to-student
interaction, and are completing development of an entire suite of
tools which would group-enable courses under this online
framework.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 examines the ties
between MOCA and its parent research program, the UMASS
DVD project. In Section 3 we discuss the suite of tools
provided to students and faculty, along with an example use-
case scenario. In Section 4 we describe the software component
and network architecture of MOCA, as well as implementation
level details. Finally, we outline our plans for future
development and deployment.
2. UMASS DVD and MOCA
The UMASS DVD project [1] is led by 7 faculties in the
Computer Systems Engineering area within the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering. The DVD group is
developing a set of integrated instructional tools and curricular
innovations, which are unified by the common theme of
multimedia systems. The approaches to this problem consist of:
• Multimedia instructional modules using web-linked
Digital Video Disks,
• Multimedia communication utilities to facilitate
student interaction, and
• Multimedia component design.
Extensive multimedia archives, source code, demonstrations,
modules, authoring materials and project details can be found at
the DVD project web-site:
http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/dvd
MOCA is being developed as a general foundation for
multimedia communication between students, teaching
assistants and professors. It is also being considered as one of
several possible multimedia presentation systems for DVD-
based instructional modules.
3. MOCA Tool Suite
The Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture aims to
implement enterprise level communications and information
sharing methods tailored to the requirements of engineering
education. We are trying to achieve this by leveraging the same
technologies used in enterprise software development. MOCA

2. is powered by the Java platform, which gives the advantages of
being hardware-independent, highly networkable, scalable, and
object oriented. MOCA is organized as pairs of client/server
modules, unified under a common application framework.
Currently, the modules consist of a set of collaboration tools, a
surveying component, and a multimedia presentation
component. Also under development are various time and
workflow management tools.
3.1 Collaboration Tools
At the heart of the MOCA project is a set of tools for enabling
real-time multimedia based communication. Currently, we have
implemented shared whiteboard, text-based chat, and shared
document-editing modules. The collaboration tools use a
channel-based model where users can create new channels, or
join group members on a pre-existing channel. Within each
channel, users can create multiple instances of each type of tool,
in order to communicate with each other. These tools keep a
full history across user sessions. Therefore, not all users need to
have joined a channel for communication to occur, as they can
log in at a later time and view all events that occurred while
they were not online (i.e. asynchronous).
Figure 1 : Use-Case diagram for main module types in
MOCA
To more fully explain how the current tools are intended to be
used, we present here an example scenario where a group of
students working on a project would collaborate with each other.
A VLSI Senior Design Project course in Spring 2000 will be the
first full MOCA courses offering, so we will use a mock version
of such a project as our example. The course will be offered at
UMASS/Amherst but will collaborate with students, faculty and
working engineers at 7 different sites worldwide.
Initial Discussion: Each assignment would be contained
within a single channel. Students would start discussing the
project and their goals within a chat. As students formalize
their ideas in a free-form brainstorming session, this initial
discussion would come to an end.
First Draft Design: After initial discussion, a first draft of
the design might be presented by one student to the others in
the group. This would be done by posting a GIF file of the
block diagram and floor plan to the whiteboard. Other
group members might find faults in this design, and pinpoint
them using the annotation tools.
Figure 2: Screenshot of MOCA multimedia whiteboard
discussing RAM core design in a Huffman coding chip.
First Draft Design Discussion: As there might be
comments on the design, which require more discussion
than simple annotation, another chat pane might be created
to further discuss this first draft, and how the group wishes
to continue with the project.
Successive Drafts: This process of design and commenting
would continue until the group feels it is appropriate to
move on. Some members of the group might also work side
by side on other aspects of the project while being able to
monitor the progress of their group members.
Analysis: For a VLSI Design project, students would also
post timing simulations and waveforms, and team members
would comment on whether they fit specifications and how
they might further need to modify the design.
Teacher Interaction & Grading: Throughout this process,
a professor or teaching assistant would be able to check on
the progress of the group, and provide feedback to the
students. A final design review might also be conducted on
the materials, allowing the professor to see not only the final
results, but also the process involved, and to what extent
each student participated in the project.

3. For situations where the chat, whiteboard, and shared-document
tools would not be appropriate for group communications,
MOCA also includes a custom e-mail and message forum client.
MOCA automatically creates message folders for each defined
group of students, as well as private message folders for each
user of the system. The group message forums are intended to
be a place of discussion on topics such as issues raised in
lecture, or homework items. The MOCA messaging system also
allows for file attachments, so that users may share files that are
not directly supported by MOCA with other group members.
3.2 Survey/Homework/Quiz Module
One of the more recent additions to the MOCA suite of tools is a
module, which will allow professors to present a multimedia
survey to a group of students [4]. These surveys fall into three
categories: a generic, anonymous survey; a homework
assignment; and a quiz or exam assignment. Faculty can create
a set of questions (true/false, multiple choice, short answer, or
general media types) and assign this set to a group of students.
Upon login, students are presented with a list of surveys, which
have not yet been completed. The module is designed to have
three distinct user interface components (creation, presentation,
and tabulation) and a server component module.
The creation component allows the administrator to distribute
the information to specific users by selecting the various types
of questions included in the survey (true/false, multiple choice,
short answer, or media types) and then entering questions via
dialog boxes. These questions can be straight text or text with
multimedia attached. Figure 3 is a pre-test for a UMASS course
in Distributed Java Applications that developed MOCA tools.
Figure 3. Screen shot of MOCA survey presentation component
[4].
The presentation component presents the information created by
the administrator to the user and creates an environment for
replying to the questions. It also receives files from the server
enabling the dynamic (as opposed to CGI forms) creation of the
user interface for each specific survey/quiz. Upon submission,
responses to each question are being sent back to the server.
The tabulation component accepts the file returned by the user
and displays it according to categories specified by the
administrator. These categories can be selected via menus and
cascaded so as to view different categories simultaneously.
The server component limits the access of the information in the
system by providing limits on the ability to view and generate
sensitive information. For example, students can be restricted
from creating quizzes. It also serves as the junction to send the
information back and forth between users and administrators.
Finally, the server provides access to the database, which stores
all the information in the module [3].
3.3 Presentation Module
Another recent addition to the MOCA framework is a tool,
which accommodates multimedia instructional modules
contained on a server or on DVDs. It provides an environment
to view and browse each specific video-based module. A search
function enables searching through entire courses for topics and
keywords. Like a Web browser, the media player will first try
to access a local copy of the video segment, or acquire the
segment from the web if one is not available. Figure 4 shows a
screenshot of the media player with course browser on the left
pane and a QuickTime player on the right. Figure 5 shows a
more advanced format which includes a document display along
with the playback of multiple camera angles synchronized and
controlled by a single tool bar or individual player toolbars.
Figure 4. Screenshot of MOCA video presentation tool
The system can present multiple videos, related multimedia
content and hyper-links all synchronized to a common timeline.
User control of the timeline playback allows students to
navigate at their own pace. When the synchronous presentation
(i.e. video) is paused, students may take notes, visit software
demonstrations, fill out quizzes and surveys, pose questions on
MOCA chat or whiteboard, and browse related links [4].
Random access of the video allows quick searching and
navigation through video-based curriculum. Curricular modules
can be selected by the student based on their interests, their
performance on quizzes, or other criteria. Thus truly customized
and flexible curricula can be developed by using the same basic
instructional materials.

4. Figure 5: Screenshot of MOCA media module with two camera
angles and slide viewer
3.5 Time and Workflow Management Tools
Also currently under development are modules which attempt to
increase productivity by simplifying workflow management
practices. These modules deal with tasks such as group meeting
scheduling and course registration. By integrating these
modules into the MOCA system users are presented with a
unified point of access for all required distance-learning tasks
[5].
4. IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS
The Multimedia Online Collaboration Architecture is a three-
tiered Java™ based distributed application system. Built from
the group up to support communications and group work over a
heterogeneous network environment, MOCA relies heavily upon
several key remote communications APIs. Communications
between the client tier and application server is accomplished
using a combination of Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
[6] and the Java Shared Data Toolkit (JSDT) [7]. The two
protocols allow for both direct client-server control information
exchange and multicast delivery of multimedia data across a
collaboration channel. The client also uses the JavaMail™ API
framework [8] with a custom protocol implementation to handle
the private mail and message forum applications. The video
presentation system is able to stream video via HTTP, RTP and
RTSP connections from external video servers.
On the client side, the user interface has been built using the
Java Foundation Classes (JFC) Swing graphics toolkit. By
extending the swing classes, we are able to implement the
desired functionality to enable communications with other
clients and the server, while maintaining a standard look-and-
feel, which adheres to User Interface Style Guidelines [9].
Based upon user interaction, the MOCA client will format data
for transfer to the server, or for multicast through collaboration
channels. Thus, the client application is neither a “thin-client”
nor a “thick-client” – instead, it is more of a medium-weight
distributed application client. This is due to the fact that some
functionality resides on the client, however all data or state
information is stored remotely, allowing transparent access to
the system from multiple locations.
The application server tier coordinates the activities of all
clients. It provides security control, application logic, and data
and state storage operations. The application server tier
communicates with an embedded database server tier through
JDBC™. The use of JDBC™ allows us to easily migrate the
MOCA server system to other commercial database server
products in the future.
5. SUMMARY
MOCA provides collaboration tools which enable group work
and cooperation between students and professors and eventually,
working engineers. By including integrated support for various
types of media such as audio, video, text and pictures, the
learning environment is enhanced. The MOCA suite of tools is
now in its third stage of development. Future development of
MOCA will involve the integration of the uncompleted modules
into the system by January 2000. In Spring 2000, the system is
being piloted in an advanced VLSI chip design course, which
allows distance learning and multimedia collaboration between
design teams and mentors distributed at academic sites at
UMASS/Amherst, ENST/Paris, Pusan South Korea and
industrial sites at IBM, Intel, AMD and Motorola.
This work was supported by NSF EIA98-12589.
6. REFERENCES
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[2] Burleson W., Ganz A., Harris I. ``Educational Innovations
in Multimedia Systems". Frontiers in Education. Puerto
Rico, 1999.

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