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A New Course in Multimedia Systems for Non-technical Majors

Wayne Burleson, Stephen Kelley, Santhosh Thampuran

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Abstract

This paper describes a project which has developed, piloted, evaluated, and is currently disseminating, a novel course in Multimedia Systems for non-majors. The course forms part of the new Information Technology minor program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The primary objective of the course is to expose students from non-technical majors to the technical aspects of Multimedia Systems. The paper discusses a number of pedagogical challenges that we attempted to meet through a wide range of teaching innovations, and also discusses approaches to assess the students. Finally, we discuss the production of a complete CD/DVD set of all course materials with synchronized and searchable video lectures and samples of student work to facilitate future offerings of the course.

1. Introduction

The primary objective of the course was to expose students from non-technical majors to the technical aspects of Multimedia Systems. This included basic representations of media in computers, algorithms for image, video and audio coding, me dia architectures, media hardware and media authoring and delivery tools.

The course made extensive use of multimedia technologies to teach about multimedia systems 1, an idea that was founded in a larger NSF grant. This course was specifically focused to a student audience without a technical background. Figure 1 shows a lecture being delivered by Prof. Burleson to the class about the NSF funded WebDVD project, which concentrates on novel video-based instructional technologies. These technologies were use d as subject matter for this course.

The fact that students had a non-technical background presented numerous challenges, the most significant of which was the technical diversity of the students in the course. We intentionally kept the course pre-requisites to a minimum, namely basic Web literacy, in order to attract a wide variety of students. In retrospect, this may have been too ambitious as it caused numerous challenges in dealing with students with widely varying backgrounds and objectives. Howeve r, it also led to an extremely dynamic course with many pleasant surprises and synergies across disciplines rarely found in a typical engineering course.

“Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright Ó 2002, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Thampuran, S. (2002, June), A New Course In Multimedia Systems For Non Technical Majors Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10837