Multimedia technologies in education institutions

Introduction

With the development of the times and specific progress, multimedia technologies and network, which is in essence a presentation of information that incorporates multiple media such as text, audio, graphics, and animation, has been widely used in education system. This development has changed the traditional way of teaching and learning and improved the quality and efficiency.

Current Use

For the situation of today’s educational institutions, we can observe that distance education and technology augmented classroom teaching, two major areas of educational multimedia, indeed have become established parts of everyday teaching and learning. It is doubtless that the multimedia applied in educational system plays an important role in this field.

Benefits of this application in educational system

Using multimedia technologies can be beneficial to both students and teachers. For example, multimedia can stimulate more than one sense at a time, and in doing so, may be more attention-getting and attention-holding. Also, it empowers students to create and design rather than absorbing representations created by others. Moreover, it gives students an opportunity to produce documents of their own which provides several educational advantages.

Security Aspects, ethical and social concerns

Because of the advance and continuous development of the educational technologies, some people start to think about the educational model of completely e-teaching which means the traditional education concepts, education institutions and teachers, would be placed. However, concerns emerge since people realize the potential disadvantages of this model: Is it really a secure environment for students to study on their own? Is it ethical to abandon the position of teachers which have been existing for thousands years?

Future use

Overall, it is accepted that the educational multimedia system is gradually replacing the traditional ways of teaching. Because educational institutions are increasingly engaged with integrating technology into the delivery of course materials and in the provision of alternate methods for learning, many predictions have been made about the future education-- the disappear of classroom-based teacher. Perhaps more researches need to be done to see whether it’s beneficial or not.

Conclusion

Although the using of multimedia technologies in educational institutions provides both teachers and students with many benefits, some concerns of security and ethic have to be considered and solved as well.