The current standard for the delivery of distance learning courses involves some creative and interactive components such as chat rooms and immediate feedback scoring on sample tests. But by and large the course material is disseminated to the student by reading; either reading a great amount of material that has been published to the site or by the extensive use of a textbook. Therefore, the primary cognitive learning approach, which all instructors have used since Archimedes, has been abandoned. The lecture, the face to face presentation consisting of sight and sound, is missing. The lecture has not been abandoned because on-line learning has a better way, but because the text-based Internet site is much easier to create, and it requires no sophisticated user software to view the site, and the download time of text copy is very fast. This paper describes 'research' into alternative delivery mechanisms, such as multimedia presentations that include voice and other audio, graphics that are created by the author or are captured from other resources, and animation that combines voice and graphics. This paper will make recommendations for the optimal approach for this development given the constraints that a) most University professors do not have the time nor the inclination to take on tremendously sophisticated software for media development, b) that 'bandwidth' is a serious constraint when transmitting over the Internet, and c) that the clarity of graphics is an important requirement for engineering and technical education.
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