Intelligent diagramming in the electronic online classroom

Digital white-boards promise to revolutionize the delivery of educational material. Like a traditional whiteboard, they support spontaneous and interactive teaching by allowing free-form editing and scribbling. However, digital white-boards also allow seamless integration of multi-media content and fit naturally into a web-based teaching environment. The e-chalk system has been built to support on-line teaching with digital white-boards in a university environment. An important feature of e-chalk is that hand drawn input is automatically interpreted. This allows sketching and scribbling to be used as an interface to powerful back-end applications. e-chalk also allows sketches and scribbles to be transcribed into semantic formats suited to flexible delivery. However, at present developing automatic sketch interpretation engines is extremely time consuming. We describe how we have extended the e-chalk system with a generic diagram interpretation component that makes development of new applications considerably faster and easier.