WWW-based acoustics education—Considerations and implementation

Abstract

The World Wide Web, WWW, is without a doubt one of the most interesting environments for computer-based education, acoustics being one of the areas of teaching. Technically, the WWW is a moderately simple system and it provides platform independence, easy operation for users, and easy use of multimedia information for content providers. But when it comes to WWW-based education, things just aren’t so simple anymore. At the Helsinki University of Technology Acoustics Laboratory, computer-based acoustics education has been a research interest for several years now. This paper considers various aspects of WWW-based acoustics education from the point of view of content design and user interaction, not forgetting usability issues or learning evaluation questions either. The goal is to explore the possibilities of the WWW technology and find the most suitable ways of providing self-study, interactive education material of acoustics and audio signal processing. Moreover, the paper discusses implementation details of interactivity, user control, and evaluation. Acoustics and sound-related topics such as on-line processing and network audio problematics have been included. An example technical solution, a ‘‘User Agent’’-style architecture, is presented along with a tutorial level sample application.