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In this paper, we present a novel idea of converting pedagogical text documents to visual learning objects by automatically extracting nouns and semantic keywords from the text documents, and representing these keywords as a word cloud. A word cloud contains words that are weighted based on frequency, time, appearance, etc., depending on the concept they are used for. Each word in the word cloud would correspond to a visual representation of that word. A visual representation may contain drawings, figures, images, etc. that explains the given concept. The extracted keywords are used to query the Internet to find the corresponding visual representation of a given word. The idea is to bring text documents to life by creating a visual representation of the important concepts from the text documents. This paper is a work in progress.

The popularity of online collaboration on lecture content has been growing steadily over the last few decades because of its potential to enhance the overall learning experience. We propose a didactical approach of online collaboration where the students and the teachers can collaborate seamlessly on the lecture contents. The approach, which we call Multiscript (MS), offers two methods of online learning on one collaboration platform. In MS, we call one method the outside of class Multiscript (OMS) and another, the inside of class Multiscript (IMS). OMS is a form of distance online learning where the students can collaborate on the lecture contents while being outside of class, whereas IMS allows online collaboration among the students and the teacher during the lecture. In OMS, the teacher can share the slides along with audio annotations for each lecture slides and/or a single recorded audio for the whole lecture. The students can access the slides and discuss (via text and audio chat) with their fellow classmates about the slides and annotate them, post feedback about the slides and ask questions to the teacher directly via MS. In IMS, the students can create annotations for the slides and post feedback to the teacher about the slides. We design MS in such a way that it can be accessed by using just a web browser on any PC, tablet or mobile device.