Publication details
Use of Multimedia in Masaryk University Information System
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2008 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Information and Communication Technology in Education Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Informatics |
| Keywords | E-learning; Masaryk University; multimedia; technical support; Elportal; Service Center for E Learning; s-technician |
| Description | Multimedia contents have recently been becoming increasingly popular. That is, multimedia have infiltrated a lot of areas of human activity including education, where they, if deployed effectively, dramatically boost the efficiency of teaching process. Since teachers come to realize their importance and tend to use them in their courses much more often than ever before, Masaryk University has begun to provide its lecturers with technical support capable of assisting them in integrating multimedia contents in these. Although the e-learning tools currently operating under IS MU are Web-based and thus enable their users to integrate a wide range of elements (e.g. images, slide shows, audio, animations, Web sites, etc.) in their teaching materials, their implementation sometimes requires advanced IT knowledge, which most teachers lack. Even if a teacher happens to know how to work with the tools, they are too busy to design the contents. This very fact has led to the establishment of Service Center, whose staff attend to multimedia-related requests made by IS users. The primary task of the Center is to create visually appealing multimedia contents that are too complicated to be produced by non-professionals and, at the same time, provide technical support to large-scale courses, i.e. high budget projects participated in by teams of developers. Over the last two years of its existence, the Center has proved its worth not only in assisting the teachers technically, but also in encouraging them to continue in their e-learning activities. Some of the Center's recent products represent multimedia textbooks containing audio and video, some of them are interactive flash animations, 3D animations, and objects made to synchronize digitized audio and video material with texts. Once completed, every product becomes accessible to students via the Information System. |
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