The production of electronic lectures often requires the active collaboration of a team consisting of content experts, instructional designers and technologists. The particular scenario that we are dealing with is that the content producers are on a remote location and we are working on a very tight schedule. This has driven the need for a solution that can easily help us to achieve effective collaboration through division of labor and automation of the lecture assembly process.

Our automation system has the advantage that the (remote) content producers can concentrate on the content itself, without having to worry about the presentation aspects of the lecture. The only technical skills required are PowerPoint and the basic features of Microsoft Producer for synchronizing the timing between video and slide transition.

In the future, we would explore how to read into Microsoft Producer the timing information of the transitions both at the bullet level and slide level specified in a text file. This way the content producers would not even have to bother with Microsoft Producer. Instead, a simple and single-purpose Web-based tool can be developed for capturing the timing information in a text file.