Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

Multimedia integration in online courses.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Rapidly developing technologies have influenced online education causing substantial changes in course design. We interviewed six online educators in a mid-western university about their course development experiences. Special attention was paid to multimedia integration. Questions included: multimedia integration in course components, multimedia development, multimedia training, multimedia and student learning, and future multimedia trends. Three themes emerged--a growth in multimedia integration in online classes, more focus on multimedia facilitated interaction and feedback, and the positive relationship between instructor training and multimedia integration in online courses.

Introduction

Education has experienced three major historical revolutions (Ehrmann, 1999). The first happened 2500 years ago when oral communication between teachers and students was supplemented and in some case replaced with reading and writing. A second upheaval occurred when students and teachers shared the same facilities such as libraries and laboratories, shaping today's educational community and campus life.

The most recent revolution has been "made possible by computing, video and telecommunication" (Ehrmann, 1999). Fahmy (2004) termed this a "technology revolution" and asserted that this change enlarged learner groups and, in particular, is now having inevitable impacts on the way universities deliver services.

Looking back at the last century, there had been a profound relationship between technologies and education, especially in the field of distance education. As a matter of fact, "all communication technologies have been used at some point as vehicles to transmit instruction and support education at a distance, including letters, newspapers, film, radio, television, and most recently, computers with web-based connections" (Clark, 2003). While the impact of technology applications on distance education had been generally positive, the force was relatively small until the widespread arrival of the World Wide Web in 1995. This "changed the distance learning landscape" (James, 2001) and made online education the centerpiece of distance education. It is probably sale to say that computers and the Internet shaped and continue to mold the way online education appears today.

Computer technology and Internet applications have unremittingly developed at an astonishingly exploding speed. In 2000 US Internet users were estimated to be over 95,000,000, 33% of the national population. In June 2005, only five years later, US Internet users climbed to over 202,000,000, 68% of...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!