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 Main Page Proposal Project Summary |
Project Summary
Curriculum resources in interactive multimedia (CRIM) will be developed to help meet the chronic shortage for trained workers in the areas of interactive multimedia applications, education, interfaces, production, programming, publishing, systems, technologies, and tools. Curriculum guidelines and courseware will be made available through a digital library accessible through the WWW, linking back to resources developed at sites around the nation that will be a part of the CRIM Consortium. With support by ACM (especially SIG Multimedia), IEEE CS (especially its TC on Multimedia), and AACE (especially through ED-MEDIA), CRIM curriculum guidelines will be published to facilitate the spread of new multimedia specializations, courses, and training programs, as well as small "knowledge modules" (that will fit into existing courses, e.g., graphics, HCI, operating systems, networking).
This project also will contribute a new methodology for preparing curricular resources in high technology fields. First, it will draw upon prior curriculum and courseware developed at Virginia Tech (VT) and The George Washington University (GW) that will serve as a strawman for future work. Second, it will couple an in-person decision support room workshop with other interested parties connected through satellite and networked videoconferencing, so a first (semester long) round of collaborative work can proceed along the lines of agreed upon curriculum development directions. Third, during that round, not only will VT and GW materials be re-worked, but small travel awards to other consortium members also will lead to broader preparation of knowledge modules that can be easily disseminated and re-used. Efforts will be monitored by the project coordination team, to ensure progress in accord with project guidelines. Server logs will provide quantitative data on adoption and use that will supplement qualitative evaluation through surveys and focus groups. Fourth, during the next academic term (semester), completed modules will be tried at sites other than where development took place, and carefully evaluated, at the same time as other new modules are built. Finally, this three-step pipeline of curriculum resource development, deployment, and evaluation will be institutionalized through the CRIM Consortium and its support by professional societies, so that periodic discussions, panels and wo rkshops at multimedia conferences can further improve CRIM materials.