Using multimedia and interactive games to enhance students' understanding of SCM

It is challenging to teach supply chain management (SCM) practices and technologies to tertiary students. This is because the back-end and highly dynamic processes can be difficult to visualise and because many students only have experience as a consumer. This paper reports the authors' experiences using a variety of multimedia and interactive enhancements we have used with our SCM learning materials: SCM business simulations; online learning modules with interactive games; and multimedia resources such as videos and animations. The paper also provides an overview of the challenges faced using these approaches, which gives rise to a number of future research opportunities. It also argues that these approaches can support educators with any epistemological view of learning. The paper makes a significant contribution because there has been little if any research into the use of these approaches in SCM education.

Using multimedia concept maps to enhance the learner experience in business law

Students’ learning experience can be affected by difficulties in understanding the interrelationships between concepts and also between topics. Concept maps have been used in many disciplines (Kremer & Gains, 1996) to structure information and express relationships between them. Their holistic approach with multiple pathways through the learning resource can make relationships and linkages between topics and subtopics obvious, and contribute to a meaningful and positive learning experience. This paper outlines the development and formative evaluation of two hypermedia concept maps which led to the development of a series of eleven concept maps to enhance the learning experience of students in a first year undergraduate business law unit.

As part of the Stage 1 formative evaluation, two concept maps were developed together with supporting multimedia resources and trialled on the learners. Feedback was also obtained from technical staff. This phase was designed to assess and control the quality of the learning resource as well as the impact it had on the learning experience. The paper closes by discussing how information gained in Stage 1 was used in Stage 2 as a basis to modify the initially trialled maps and to develop the other supporting maps.

Mathematics teacher education and technology

Various applications of electronic technology have contributed to the field of mathematics teacher education, but the array of tools now' available to teacher educators in developed countries can be somewhat daunting. In this chapter, the authors present an overview of some of these tools and the ways that they are being used. In addition, they address issues surrounding the development and applications of digital technology in teacher education programs in a number of countries. In particular, they present recent applications of videotapes, multimedia resources, internet-based communities, and tutorial conferencing facilities in pre-service and in-service education of mathematics teachers. As professionals who have used technology in teacher education, the authors blend their own insights into this review of technological tools and relevant issues.

Problem-based learning in an online IT professional practice course

Educational research suggests that Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is a pedagogy that fosters a deeper understanding of the curriculum and provides students with processes and skills for lifelong learning. According to the literature this pedagogy appears to be a suitable one for teaching undergraduate information technology, yet adoption of PBL in information technology tertiary education appears to be slow. This paper discusses characteristics and processes of PBL and describes how the approach will be used in teaching information technology professional practice. The course described will be offered to information technology students in their final year of study and will be delivered wholly online. The course will not only provide best practice aspects of PBL but it will also provide students with the opportunity of undertaking authentic tasks using multimedia resources that simulate the real world.

Thinking multimedia

Children in our society have access to many information resources and communication options. As we witness the convergence of art, literacy and publishing, individuals need to learn how to make sense of information presented in many different forms, and how to construct their own communications in multiple media.
Thinking Multimedia is a program that has developed out of many projects that I have run in several school and some tertiary institutions over the past 12 years. It is an attempt to integrate skills and knowledge from different academic disciplines and to encourage students to understand learning processes and their own learning preferences. The course, offered at this stage at Year 10 level at St Catherine’s School in Melbourne, aims to provide background and basic skills in how to construct and deconstruct information in multiple media and to provide students with the opportunity to explore a ‘real need’ project of their own in a project-based team environment. The course is supported by an online resource and discussion component.
In this presentation I will explain the background to the Thinking Multimedia program and explore some of the work by the students involved.

Staff and student views of the usefulness of information technology materials within an integrated curriculum: are these educational resources effective in promoting student learning?

This paper reports on a study on the perceived effectiveness of educational resources within the context of a single course in a first-year biology program at the University of Sydney (Australia). The overall study examined the dynamic state of perceptions towards these resources by the major stakeholders involved with the course (students, teaching staff, and technical staff). A major focus of the research was the extent to which the students used the computer-based resources made available to them, and staff and students' perceptions of the usefulness of these resources in supporting their learning. Specifically, results are discussed related to student use of computers and the Internet, use of biology online materials in the virtual learning environment, use and perceptions of communication technologies, and use and perceptions of computer-based online resources. Data were collected from the students using surveys and focus groups and from staff using surveys and interviews within an action-research paradigm. While the majority of students found the resources to be of use in supporting learning, some did not find them useful, and some did not use them at all. In comparison, the staff had higher expectations of both usage and usefulness. The level of student use was not a function of access to computers or the Internet, so the findings suggest that the provision of online resources will not necessarily generate value-added learning.

Multimedia campaign on a shoestring : promoting 'Stay Active - Stay Independent' among seniors

Issue addressed: This paper describes a multimedia campaign implemented in rural New South Wales on a budget smaller than that typical of many published campaigns. The 'To Be Young at Heart- Stay Active Stay Independent' (SASI) campaign was one arm of a multi- strategic program to reduce falls among seniors by promoting physical activity. Methods: This 18-month campaign used social marketing techniques. Central to this campaign was strong formative research, significant use of corporate, community and media partnerships and a detailed, strategic distribution plan. Campaign reach was evaluated by a community intercept survey. Results: A variety of high quality information, education and communication (IEC) resources were developed. Overall, the campaign cost was calculated at $191,000. The actual cost of $42,000 (excluding staff time) was used to generate almost double this amount in sponsorship ($82,000). In the mid-campaign reach survey, 36% recognised the campaign and attributed this to television (58%), newspaper (33%), poster (13%) and bus-back advertising (8%). Of these respondents, 21% reported seeking information about physical activity, 33% reported increased intention to be more active, and 22% reported becoming more active as a result of the campaign. Conclusions: It is possible to develop and deliver a well designed, multimedia campaign on a limited budget by using sound formative research and engaging community and corporate partners to generate sponsorship. An effective distribution strategy is crucial and may require additional partnerships at State or national level.

Dynamic path determination policy for distributed multimedia content adaptation

Multimedia content adaptation allows the ever increasing variety of handheld devices such as Smartphones to access distributed rich media resources available on the Internet today. Path planning and determination is a fundamental problem in enhancing performance of distributed multimedia content adaptation systems. Most of the existing path determination mechanisms use static path determination criteria based solely on associating a path with a single behavior aggregate score. However, some criteria such as availability are best represented using different functionality rather than being accumulated into the aggregate score. Moreover, since selection criteria have different behavior towards the score, this principle need to be considered. In this paper, we propose a dynamic multi-criteria path determination policy that selects an optimal path to the content adaptation services that best meet the user preferences and QoS requirements. The performance of the proposed approach is studied in terms of score’s fairness and reliability under different variations. The results indicate that the proposed policy performs substantially better than the baseline policy.

Ubiquitous multicore (UM) methodology for multimedia

For more than a decade now, multimedia developers have usually "ride the waves", so to speak, with the coming of each generation of microprocessors, which allows their applications, designs and programs to usually running more proficiently, efficiently and effectively. This so-called "free" ride seems to be coming to an end, with results of increases clock speeds, the widening of the gap in processor and memory performance, and the tradeoffs that are needed to meet the former two points, with the new multi-core systems. In this paper, we build upon our previous work within multi-core systems, by proposing a ubiquitous multi-core (UM) design. The goal of such a framework is help researchers to plan and implement their multimedia applications so they can take advantage of speed up computations of multi-core systems and allow real-time multimedia. As our experiments show, our UM system increases performance speeds at an average of 100%, with the average execution cost of 1.4ms, showing that multimedia can use multi-core resources efficiently and effectively.