Project SET
Modules
COMMUTE: Consortium of MultiMedia for the University of TennesseE
Brian Benneyworth
Medical Student (Class of 2005)David Yam
Medical Student (Class of 2004)Vicki Murrell
Director of Instructional TechnologyAs technology improves, educational design relies on sharing electronically stored multimedia (movies, pictures, audio, and graphics) among faculty, staff, and students. Multimedia assists students in expanding their conceptual understanding beyond the written word. The greatest obstacles to using multimedia are storing large files, finding appropriate multimedia for the subject, and, if necessary, transferring a traditional media to electronic format. This project seeks to develop a database that acts a repository of multimedia file types using a web-based interface to search, view, and upload images. Such a database allows community storage of multimedia files and a common access point via the web to those files. The database allows for selection of specific multimedia files for use in presentations or lectures as well as a source of multimedia for web-based applications. To demonstrate a database’s functionality at supplying multimedia for web-based applications, the project will develop a web-based application that allows instructors to define a sub-set of images within the database for a tutorial on a particular topic. This application will be developed for both computer and PDA interface to demonstrate the flexibility associated with storing multimedia images with in a collective database. The project’s tutorial module will not define the functionality of the database, but rather provide an example of the unlimited uses for the system.