Multimedia in education

Multimedia has a role in education, because of its ability to present information in a format that interests the users. It can serve to complement traditional instruction. According to Luehrmann (1994), multimedia instructional software cannot totally replace the human teacher, because the purpose of education is not entirely academic. He further pointed out that schools not only provide the environment for learning, it also lets pupils interact and communicate with adults and peers. Multimedia can potentially offer learners the ability to access information in a appealing format without the direct presence of an instructor. This could reduce the cost of education and/or increase the accessibility of information. By reducing the overhead of educating and employing trained teacher to teach standardized and basic information, the cost of education could be reduced. By providing asynchronous instruction on demand, multimedia can potentially enable each individual to learn at their own pace. Although, these benefits are not yet realized in any large scale, business and educational communities are gearing up for the information revolution that is 1 taking place with multimedia being the catalyst (Bingham, 1992; Multimedia Source Guide, 1995-96). This revolution will transform the current education structure. Because in order to reap the benefits of multimedia, the traditional teacher-student , group instruction , grade-diploma educational system is not compatible with the ability of multimedia to provide asynchronous instruction individually