Considerable research has gone into investigating networking and operating
system mechanisms to support the transfer and playout of stored continuous
media, bur there Is very little information available about how users actua
lly interact with such systems. Developing a user workload characterization
can help in the design and evaluation of efficient CM resource allocation
and access mechanisms. The authors developed an interactive Web-based, mult
imedia, client-server application, known as the Multimedia Asynchronous Net
worked Individualized Courseware, or MANIC, which streams synchronized CM (
currently audio) and HTML documents to remote users.
This article presents empirical and analytic characterizations of observed
user session-level behavior (for example, the length of individual sessions
) and interactive behavior (for example, the time between starting, stoppin
g, and pausing the audio within a session). The data come: from a full-seme
ster senior-level course given by the University of Massachusetts to more t
han 200 students who used MANIC to listen to the stored audio lectures and
to view the lecture notes.