5 Design of multimedia teaching materials for virtual engineering education

Abstract- The term multimedia describes a number of diverse technologies that allow visual and audio media to be combined in new ways for the purpose of communicating. The use of multimedia in learning has been growing rapidly. The explosion of this use has been attributed to the assumption that multimedia helps people to learn. Some studies have shown that multimedia can help people learn more information better than traditional classroom lectures. Several factors have been attributed to the success of multimedia in helping people to learn. First, parallelism between multimedia and the natural way in which people learn, second, information in multimedia can be presented in a non-linear format and third, multimedia can be more interactive than traditional classroom lectures. Although interactive multimedia materials are now an essential part of most virtual learning environments, very little attention is paid to the pedagogical bases of the design of such materials. This paper studies the contribution of different learning theories to the design of teaching multimedia materials of high pedagogical value applicable to virtual engineering education