Multimedia courseware for teaching dynamic concepts: assessment of student learning

The rise of multimedia has spurred the development of innovative packages for educational use. But what are students learning? To make the best use of this technology, we need to examine how it can enhance student learning. This makes issues of assessment very important. Multimedia is particularly powerful in engineering education for allowing students to visualize various dynamic physical phenomena, such as vibrations. We discuss the assessment of learning for those students who use the GT-VIBS multimedia package and case study to learn about engineering vibrations. We also performed evaluation of the software. We accomplished this by conducting an experiment in which students who use a multimedia tutorial module or an engineering case study were compared to students who read text. We present some of our preliminary results.