Development of an online multimedia course

Abstract

At the University of Rijeka the theoretical knowledge is mainly transferred by the traditional model consisting of professor explaining material to a group of students in front of a blackboard. We believe that this model dates from the period of the industrial revolution when it was necessary to educate large number of people to work on new machines, but there was no technology for more efficient knowledge transfer. Nowadays, such a model cannot keep up with the speed of generating new knowledge and technology. A larger number of participants cannot be educated due to time and space constraints, and the knowledge usually becomes obsolete by the end of studies. The result of this model are students with skills unadapted to the labor market requirements. We believe this is an extremely important issue for our university. One of the possible solutions might be digitizing theoretical parts of courses. Using web technologies, theoretical lectures can be held online and in that way more efficient methods of teaching on campus can be used. In this paper, the process of digitizing the university course Introduction to Psychology is presented, as well as the benefits that can be achieved by creating and using multimedia online courses.