Ref: 031101
New technologies in higher education will change teaching and learning: Computer based training, computer assisted learning and teaching will be no longer slogans but will become common like other techniques as videoconferencing, lecture on demand or self-instructing courseware. But we think that there will be no real revolution in teaching and learning techniques. More likely there will be a (sometimes slowly) evolution, because not only techniques have to change but also teachers and students have to adopt themselves to that changes.
But not only education is challenged by the new techniques. University research and development and even administration will be influenced by multimedia. A broad variety of information that is now traditionally handled will be performed by multimedia information systems.
In this paper we will sketch some multimedia techniques and their application in academic teaching and learning on the one hand and their application on a special example in university medicine on the other hand. We will discuss the possible benefits and will not hide the difficulties that arise in the context of their implementation.
In the following section we will deal with three main questions:
1. What actions must be taken to establish multimedia techniques?
2. How does the technical scenario look like to provide an adequate
technical infrastructure for multimedia?
3. What organizational infrastructure can support multimedia
in teaching and learning?
The scenario which we have in mind is that of the Duesseldorf University. Thus, the following statements and sections can not be valid for every university in every country. Some might step ahead others may lagging behind.
There is also no correlation between price and quality.
However, deciding to use these products depends on the evaluation by the lecturers.
· Transfer of lectures to another place within the same university.
· Cooperation between universities by transfer of lectures.
· Real-time video conference between two lectures on the
same subject in different universities.
Most important parts of the technical infrastructure are:
· A high speed network with a big bandwidth.
· Multimedia labs for the design of own CAT- and CAL-products.
· Video servers keeping lectures, parts of it or other video
information for supporting university education.
· Electronic lecture-halls.
To keep the organizational structure easy to survey it is planned to
have a permanent multimedia working group in Duesseldorf consisting of:
· representatives of the different faculties,
· library,
· computing center and
· administration.
This working group is responsible for:
· progression of the multimedia concept for Duesseldorf university,
· planning, implementation and integration of new multimedia
techniques,
· survey of the technical realization,
· coordination of all tasks concerning multimedia aspects in
university.
Health care has lagged for a long time behind other domains supporting work by efficient computerized techniques. One exception are systems for financial transactions in hospitals and for patient admission, as related topics. These were the first systems supporting data processing in hospitals. Information systems for patient-related medical information came up later. Information in these systems is mainly handled in a traditional -non multimedia- manner.
The next section will sketch some aspects of changing traditional patient records to multimedia records and the benefits connected with this change.
Patient records, however, are often found to be handled on a traditional manner. That means: a lot of paper, more or less exact and readable or complete, possibly referring to further data in X-ray archives, ECG departments, labs, ... .
During the last years a lot of efforts have been pushed into computerizing patient records 1). The term EPR (electronic patient record) describes and summarizes these efforts. In Europe a pre standard has been defined by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN).
Patient records in principle are multimedial constructs in an almost natural sense: The information stored in and ordered by an patient record consists of written material, pictures, graphics. The associated information can enclose for example film sequences (heart catheterisation), curve diagrams (ECG, EEG). Voice information is stored rarely in a traditional patient record by lack of an adequate medium. But a lot of information during the patient`s examination is acoustic information. Additionally, an EPR is handled very interactively. With these details an EPR-system is qualified as a multimedia system.
For the user (doctors) of an multimedia EPR-system arise a lot of advantages:
· Reduction of written materials. Representation of information
by means of a graphical patient record.
· Direct access even to time dependent media like X-ray films.
· Possibilities to integrate other media like videos or voice
information to the patient record.
The simplest visual features that can be computed and retrieved are based on pixel values of raw data, and several early image database systems used pixels as the basis of their data models. A pixel-based model suffers from several drawbacks. One is, that variations in illumination and other imaging conditions affect pixel values drastically, leading to incorrect query results, but significant video segmentation results can be obtained by measuring pixel differences over time.
Most applications for VIR fall between automated pixel-oriented information models and fully human-assisted database schemes. They do not require pixel-level queries; nor are they constrained to only a few object classes. For this middle-of-the-spectrum applications, visual information can be defined in terms of image-processing transformations computed on the visual object. In most of these middle-of-the-spectrum applications even the system's designer needed training to perform effective retrieval. In medical-image databases, fully automatic feature extraction is still a research problem. The general experience is that completely automated image analysis works well only for small, controlled domains and it is very computation intensive.
Moving from images to videos in VIR adds several orders of complexity. Most research and commercial efforts take the following approach: Consider a video clip as a large number of image frames with progressively varying image content. Videos contain three kinds of motion information: one due to movement of the objects within the scene, second due to motion of the camera, and third due to special post-processing effects, like image warping. Ideally, a video information system integrates motion and frame information into a single computational framework, but current research is not there yet.
Summarizing we can say that many aspects of VIR systems are important for the application of multimedia techniques im medicine but they are not yet properly understood. Especially for the retrieval of multimedia databases there are still a lot of research problems.
The question of the costs for the technical implementation is easy to solve. In contrast to this, the description of benefits is a hard job. What is the benefit of the multimedia support for teaching and learning? What amount (in ECU e.g.) is it worth? Being not able to answer these questions we will choose another way to describe benefit. We will try to answer the following question: what could be the obstacles, what are the difficulties for multimedia techniques to produce benefits?
Estimated costs for: Amount (in ECU): Investments Electronic lecture-hall (per piece) 110.000 Multimedia-lab (per installation) 90.000 Video server 125.000 Future costs for investments (5%, per year) 9.000 Man power (per year) Multimedia-lab 100.000 Video server 25.000This table does not contain costs for network infrastructure which is a condition sine qua non for any multimedia technique and it does not contain costs for further extensions of the underlying network.
These few examples show that the costs are enormous: one electronic lecture-hall is not enough for a large university no more than the installation of one multimedia lab. Thus, the respective costs in the table have to multiplied by an adequate factor. Over the years the costs for investments still stay relatively small. The real financial problem are the costs for the supporting man-power.
Obstacles and difficulties1. Old habits.
2. Change in self-understandig: the professor is not a teacher
but a learning facilitator.
3. Preparing multimedia for teaching requires a lot of time.
4. Support of teachers in preparing multimedia requires a lot
of man-power and for that reason a lot of money.
5. ...
Points 3 and 4 are only technical obstacles that could be solved by means of time, man-power and/or money. Real problems are old habits or necessary changes in self-understanding of teaching persons. The ,,real" integration of multimedia techniques means a fundamental change of teaching methods also.
For multimedia support in other areas of interest (like administration or medicine) we have the same technical and financial restrictions like in teaching and learning. Specific for these areas is -as pointed out already in the section about visual information retrieval- the need for further research. Often there is a great uncertainty how multimedia techniques could support a given area of interest.
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Copyright EUNIS 1997 Y.E.