Educational innovations in multimedia systems

Multimedia systems have emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of computing systems and thus need to be well integrated into a computer engineering curriculum. Fortunately the teaching and learning of multimedia systems can be aided with novel instructional techniques based on multimedia. The DVD project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is developing a unified set of instructional materials on the engineering techniques used in the design and test of hardware, software and networks for multimedia. This large project includes three facets: (1) multimedia instructional modules using web-linked digital video disks, (2) multimedia communication utilities to facilitate student interaction, and (3) multimedia component design projects. In this paper, we explain our approach to using multimedia as both content and instructional technology and briefly present preliminary results in each of the three facets.