The effect of audio-Video quality on learning effectiveness in distance learning over IP networks

This paper deals with multimedia distance learning over IP networks and investigates the most suitable presentation style of contents according to communication quality by experiment. We compare three styles of contents: “text”, “text and audio” and “text, audio and video.” For the three presentation styles of contents, we examine how the learning effectiveness of the learners depends on the communication quality. The learning effectiveness is assessed in terms of the ratio of correct answer. As a result, we find that the audio-video with text raises the learning effectiveness compared to the text only if the communication quality is high. As the communication quality deteriorates, however, the audio-video degrades the learning effectiveness, which eventually becomes lower than that of the text-only case. Furthermore, we show a guideline for the selection of the best presentation style of contents for a given amount of the load traffic by means of regression analysis.