Enhanced Learning Using Mutimedia-Interactive Systems: An Experimental Study

The education field is in a process of change driven by new developments in multimedia technology, which is being used as a complementary alternative for teaching purposes. This paper describes a thesis project developed through an exploratory study comparing the effects of using three different teaching approaches: traditional teacher-led instruction, web page instruction and a multimedia-interactive system. The principal objective is to find out whether the use of a prototype multimedia-interactive delivers better outcomes in teaching complex subjects such as data structures, than web page and traditional teacher-led instruction approaches. Information Systems Design Theory was used to develop a multimediainteractive tool. Students were taught to use binary trees to compare the three teaching methods. Pilot test results show that there are significant differences in performance of students who used the multimedia-interactive tool. It is concluded that the multimedia-interactive system prototype can effectively be used to help students learn binary trees.