Technology is having a dramatic effect on colleges and universities, producing what may be the most challenging period in the history of higher education. One form of the convergence of technology and education is distributed learning. The World Wide Web (WWW) provides alternative means for delivery of the courses and services, providing learners with an extraordinary range of options. Distance learning methods are being developed and implemented to offer educational opportunities to those who are unable or choose not to attend an educational institution on a conventional, scheduled basis. There are few, if any, studies that have attempted to evaluate the learning achieved through interactivity of students with the online contents using interactive multimedia in online environments, perhaps because of the difficulties in designing rich multimedia contents, a tight experiment for such studies and the fact that confounding variables can easily become significant. The purpose of this study would be to investigate the effectiveness of learning through interactive multimedia and present the results. This research report provides information on the design and development of an online Computational Method in Engineering Technology course. The course will be interactive multimedia-based including 3D animation, simulation, video, graphics, and audio. The research considers information on the theoretical framework for designing the course, the process of developing the multimedia and developing the course. The results of the study on the effectiveness of the course will be reported in the presentation. Major points of emphasis studied in this research include: 1. Discussing the need for multimedia-rich courses for teaching technology-based subjects in online environments. 2. Developing multimedia based online courses. 3. The effects of using Multimedia in teaching technology-based concepts. 4. The results of the study on the effects of using multimedia in an online environment. 5. Results of student attitudes toward learning through multimedia.
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