Figure 1(a): Entry Level for Multimedia Students
Figure 1(b): Typical Unit Schedule
Rod Sims, School of Multimedia & Information Technology, Southern Cross University, PO Box 157, Lismore, NSW 2480, Australiarsims@scu.edu.au
Julian Melville, School of Multimedia & Information Technology, Southern Cross University, PO Box 157, Lismore, NSW 2480, Australia jmelvill@scu.edu.au
As demand for quality education and information access increases, so does the need for personnel qualified in the design and delivery of informational, learning and instructional resources. This paper describes the development of the Bachelor of Multimedia (BMM) at Southern Cross University from a traditional on-campus program to one embracing flexible and on-line delivery. The paper will focus on the technological infrastructure required to support the program, the resources required to deliver the program and the pedagogical issues associated with on-line delivery and student learning in the tertiary context. Included in the discussion are assessments of issues associated with internet-based access and delivery as well as usage statistics and student feedback.
In 1996, Southern Cross University introduced a Bachelor of Educational Multimedia (BEdM) program designed to capture a niche market ñ students wishing to study the disciplines associated with educational technology and the application of computer technology to teaching, learning and performance processes. Since its inception however, a series of factors have necessitated a reassessment of both its structure and delivery:
Given this environment, a restructured Bachelor of Multimedia was developed with the aim to provide students with comprehensive study in the field of multimedia, taking advantage of specialisations within teaching units to consolidate the multi-disciplinary nature of interactive multimedia. On completion of the course, students would be expected to have:
The locations http://edmm.scu.edu.au/ and http://multimedia.scu.edu.au identify the teaching and marketing web-sites respectively of the multimedia program offered by Southern Cross University. There were several reasons for moving towards on-line delivery of multimedia content, including an increased focus on international delivery of courses, a large cohort of mature and part-time students, changing socio-economic conditions and an overall commitment towards more flexible delivery within the teaching unit, the School of Multimedia and Information Technology.
With the overall goal of being able to offer the full undergraduate multimedia program in a flexible mode of study from 2000, a phased program of preparation for on-line delivery was commenced during Semester 1, 1998. The initial phase of this process involved introducing the on-campus students to on-line access of materials by providing the majority of unit resources and teaching materials on the web, even though classes continued to be delivered in the traditional internal (face-to-face) mode.
Additional preparation for the task of adopting an on-line strategy consisted of informal interviews with students to discuss the structure that would be most beneficial to their learning, assessment of other similar implementations, a review of similar teaching sites already implemented and a review of the overall strategy of the multimedia program. Based on this assessment, a structure for the site was designed to include:
For the individual units, information included:
These structures, which have remained relatively constant since their introduction, are shown in Figures 1(a) and 1(b). With the original version of the site, the on-line teaching materials continued to reflect the on-campus, face-to-face teaching structure of each unit. Apart from some tutorial material, the educational content was not especially designed for on-line learning. While this is not a perfect situation, the major goal of the current phase of the Multimedia On-Line project was to integrate the use of the web-site into the teaching program, and this has been achieved.
Now that the site is an integral component of the multimedia program, more attention is being directed towards the successful implementation of on-line learning strategies. For example, we have implemented the public domain discussion software Discuss into the underlying communication framework and plan to compare its operation with those provided by commercial applications such as TopClass, WebCT and Learning Space.
Figure 1(a): Entry Level for Multimedia Students
Figure 1(b): Typical Unit Schedule
One of the design parameters was to secure the site to restrict access to those students enrolled in the program. The two main options available were to restrict access by network address or by username and password; initially the username and password option was ignored because of the potential administration problem of maintaining password lists. However, after determining that students could conceivably wish to access the site from anywhere in the world, making network address restrictions impractical, the second option was chosen. Fortunately the web server being used (Novell Web Server 3.1) allowed the securing of web sites using existing IntraNetware account information, which has to date worked well in practice.
The design of the web pages themselves was driven by several main goals, chiefly the desire to make a site that was easy to navigate and pages that were fast to download over a modem. The wide range of client machines, operating systems and web browsers that could be used to view the site meant that the HTML code had to be simple and straightforward, avoiding browser-specific tags and scripting languages. Many of the conclusions of Nielsen relating to site navigation and page design were found to be very useful in achieving these goals (Nielsen & Sano,1994; Nielsen, nd)
The resulting site (as represented in Figure 1b) features minimal use of graphics, with techniques such as table background colours being used instead. Pages are identified with the name of the author, the date first published and the date of the most recent modification to indicate to students when material has changed. An hierarchical navigation system at the top of each page indicates where in the site structure the student is currently browsing, with links on the left-hand-side to the top of each significant area of the site. Links to pages that are within the current site structure are marked with blue arrows, while links to other web sites are marked with red arrows; links to non-electronic resources are marked in black.
Initial production of the site was implemented using a template-based publishing system (Userland Frontier), which enabled rapid development of the structure of the site. Because the overall look of the pages is governed by these templates, and the content of the pages is stored separately, changes to the whole site can be implemented quickly and easily. The original web site incorporated most of the features of the original design, the major omission being the news area. As electronic mailing lists were already heavily used within the multimedia program to communicate with students and disseminate news, it was decided not to create yet another place for news to be published, and instead to use the web site to archive postings to the mailing lists. The archival feature is to be incorporated into the next major revision of the site.
Initial assessment of student feedback to the site revealed overall positive results, as shown in Figure 2. In a rating scale from 0-5, all major factors were rated favourably, with the possible exception of the On-Time factor. This highlights one of the major issues confronting the development of web-sites in general and on-line learning sites in particular, that of regular and up-to-date maintenance. Once the student cohort becomes entrenched in using on-line materials, any delay in access is noted almost immediately!
Overall, the Multimedia On-Line site has been used as the primary information resource for most of the twenty units taught during the first and seconds semesters of 1998. While there were some difficulties in producing and publishing the information in a timely fashion, many of these were related to a lack of suitable writing tools for on-line publishing. The traditional software packages used for writing have many problems when they are used to write material intended for on-line delivery, but as this is an area of significant change, it is anticipated that such tools will mature over time.
The original multimedia web site detailed above operated on a Digital 3000 server with dual 166 MHz Pentium processors, 96 Mb RAM and Novell Netware 4.11. The server was also used for individual user accounts for all multimedia students, providing 100Mb of working space to each student. The students used Netware from the laboratory machines to access this space directly.
The web server application was Novell's own Netware Web Server version 3, a simple, unsophisticated server with one important feature: we were able to secure web pages with those usernames and passwords drawn directly from the existing Novell user database (NDS). From an administration perspective this was fantastic, as there was no need to maintain a separate set of usernames and passwords specifically for the web site. From students' points of view, they could use the same username and password to read the web site that they used elsewhere on the campus network. While this environment represented a small security risk because the usernames and passwords were being sent as only-slightly-encoded plain text over the web, we resolved to upgrade the problem in future implementations of the site.
For the basic task of serving static HTML pages as rapidly as possible, the configuration detailed above was adequate. Over time however, with increased student numbers, the machine was seen to be operating at capacity and the site was running low on disk space. The 96 Mb of RAM soon proved to be insufficient, and was increased to 256 Mb. The machine was upgraded to use dual 266 MHz Pentium II processors and a larger RAID disk array was fitted to cope with the increased numbers.
Unfortunately, as with many software applications, the Netware web server became an unsupported product and was replaced by the Netscape Enterprise web server, ported to run on the Netware platform by a joint Novell-Netscape company called Novonyx. The Netscape server has some advantages, the primary one being that the site can run off the larger RAID, rather than the smaller main-server hard disk, which meant that we were in a position to integrate the site better with our other network resources. The server also has some disadvantages: - it's complicated to administer, occasionally seems to have some problems with configuration and doesn't directly support the NDS security as the previous server did, except in extremely limited form. At the time of writing, the web-site is operational although the underlying network infrastructure is still being refined.
Apart from the technical infrastructure necessary to support an on-line learning environment, to teach a program such as a Bachelor of Multimedia requires a wide range of resources and infrastructure support. This was even more critical as the program was being introduced at the Coffs Harbour campus of the university, half-way between the major east coast centres of Sydney and Brisbane which are proving to be sources of a large percentage of the annual intake. By way of summary, the following provides an overview of the major resources supporting the program.
As at March 2nd 1999, there are four full-time and two part-time/casual staff supporting the teaching of the program. It is anticipated that, subject to maintenance of EFTSU, this will increase to four full-time staff, especially once the postgraduate programs are established. The program is supported by a full-time technical officer who is responsible for the installation and maintenance of the laboratories and network.
The support for the teaching is a Novell network linking one PC laboratory, one Macintosh laboratory and one Workshop which includes high-level machines, scanners and CD-burners. Students also have access to Digital Cameras and Video Cameras for borrowing. The PC laboratories operate with Windows NT and the Macintosh laboratories with OS-8. The main software installed is Macromedia Authorware and Director for multimedia development, Adobe Photoshop for graphics manipulation, Adobe Premiere for video digitising and Sound Edit for audio digitising. Additional packages are also provided for specialised 2D, 3D and animation work.
We use a range of both instructional and multimedia textbooks, specifically Alessi & Trollip (1991), Boyle (1997), Hofstetter (1997) and Tannenbaum (1998), as well as books of readings for each unit being made available to students for purchase. However, as the printed word is often regarded as out-of-date as soon as its in print, additional resources sourced through reliable on-line sites are also considered critical.
One of the measures used to determine the success of the Multimedia On-Line web site has been the automatic collection of web-server usage statistics over the past two teaching semesters. For this analysis, a comparison of both general student usage of the site as well as specific access for the teaching and learning activities has been provided and is illustrated in the following figures.
Figure 3(a) represents the weekly number of page requests issued from the site in the first and second teaching semesters of 1998. Two significant trends emerge from this data; the first is that as we became more proficient in setting up the site, usage increased and the the second is that as students were completing their second semester work usage (presumably through revision) increased markedly.
Figure 3(b): Daily Usage of the Web Site
Figure 3(c): Hourly Usage of the Web Sit
Figure 3(b) and Figure 3(c) represent both Daily and Hourly usage over the 1998 teaching year. As might be expected, use of the system was predominantly during the Monday-Friday period and from 8:00am to 5:00pm. While it may be desirable from a teaching perspective to have seen more consistent usage across both days and hours, such information is critical for planning maintenance and upgrades to the network to ensure its reliability.
The value of both student and system data in evaluating the operational and educational aspects of the application cannot be underestimated.
The implementation of any technology-based learning application should, theoretically, be based on a sound educational rationale which provides a clear statement of the teaching and/or learning advanatages which will be achieved through that intervention. And the primary factor contributing to this implementation was the very content of the overall program, which aims to teach students the techniques of design, development, implementation and evaluation of interactive multimedia technology. Therefore it was considered critical that the technology being focused on within the program should be shown to be used effectively. A secondary factor contributing to the decisions to adopt on-line teaching and learning strategies has been the changing demographics of the student population and the seeming inexorable shift towards fee-paying courses, which has put additional financial burdens onto people seeking tertiary education. Consequently, the demand for programs delivered in a flexible mode where students have more choice in the time and place that they undertake their study has increased. This is also consistent with the theories of adult learning (e.g. Cross, 1981; Knowles, 1990) which promote the learner has an individual who should have control over their learning outcomes. Fortuitously perhaps, the last 12 months have seen an increaseing demand in students who are requesting external access to the program ñ one which can be relatively simply be addressed with on-line strategies.
Another aspect of adopting on-line learning strategies is the extent to which the implementation is innovative. It is the position of the authors that the emphasis must remain on the quality and integrity of the teaching and learning experiences provided for students. While on-line applications can provide alternative and more accessible opportunities to educational activities and resources, they may not inherently mainifest innovations in the pedagogical strategy. Our aim will be to continue to provide the best undergraduate program focusing on multimedia, using the best combination of on-line, on-campus and distance education practices.
Technology continues to march forward at an alarming pace, with an ever expanding range of software options and upgrades, not to mention the insatiable demand for faster computers and the lurking presence of a corporate controlled Internet! For those whose work involves educating people for a technology-based career, there is comfort in the knowledge that the principles of good design and communication remain constant, although potentially conflict with the new student who has difficulty perhaps seeing beyond the instant gratification of MHz and memory. Our challenge for the future is to keep pace with technology without being overwhelmed, to maintain our research to ensure effective delivery of technology-based information and never to forget that the computer is simply a tool for the information age.
Over the past 3 years the multimedia course offered by Southern Cross University has undergone significant evolution and change; fortunately this change has been content rather than technology driven and the current structure is anticipated to remain stable but evolutionary for the forseeable period.
Alessi, S.M. & Trollip, S.R. (1991). Computer-Based Instruction: Methods and Development. 2nd Edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Boyle, T. (1997). Design for Multimedia Learning. London: Prentice Hall.
Cross, K.P. (1981). Adults as Learners. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Hofstetter, F.T. (1997). Multimedia Literacy. New York: McGraw-hill.
Knowles, M. (1990). The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species. 4th Edition. Houston: Gulf Publishing.
Nielsen, J. & Sano, D. (1994). "SunWeb: User Interface Design for Sun Microsystem's Internal Web". http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/uidesign/sunweb/
Nielsen, J. (nd). "Alertbox" series of articles. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
Tannenbaum, R.S. (1998).Theoretical Foundation of Multimedia. New York: Computer Science Press.
Rod Sims and Julian Melville, © 1999. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and