The document discusses developing an educational platform. It will include courses organized into books, shelves, and a main bookcase interface for navigation. Multimedia is seen as extending traditional books by adding interactivity and different learning styles. However, multimedia in classrooms can fragment learning if elements come from different sources and lack context. PowerPoint slides also fragment information if students cannot recreate the sequence. The platform aims to digitally distribute educational resources to improve accessibility on and off campus. Development will involve several stages to create this new platform for education.

1. Software Project
Educational Platform
Gabrian Cristina
Master: TI, An 1

2. Content
 1. PLATFORM OVERVIEW
 2. Multimedia as evolutionary extension of books
 3. Learning content fragmentation when using multimedia in a
classroom
 4. Analogue vs. digital distribution
 6. Stages to develop an education platform

3. 1. PLATFORM OVERVIEW
 The platform is a collection of course
theory and other educational material.
 OH-like, e-pages with hypertext are
grouped in chapters. Chapters are
grouped in books.
 Books are grouped in shelves. The
shelves are grouped in bookcases in the
main menu
 The Main Room, forming the
characteristic “bookshelf” interface
 This is a clear analogy to traditional
paper books
 Simple structure of a bookcase is shown
in Fig. 1
 For navigation purposes both the
bookshelf menu and the Browser can be
used.

4. 2. Multimedia as evolutionary extension of books
 Taking into account that asking questions by students during lectures is
relatively rare,
 - the scenario implied a situation when instead of a typical lecture one
might get a multimedial sequence with dynamic image, sound and
elements of interactivity
 There is a statement denying that the new technology will substitute a
teacher.
 The statement seems reasonable: when books were invented, this did not
mean a replacement of the teachers.
 Nowadays a book is not enough: the global trend worldwide is to extend
presentation with multimedia
 This trend is reflected by the fairly common theory6 that learners have
individual learning styles and each person has definite preferences for use
of different senses/media when learning.

5. 3. Learning content fragmentation when using
multimedia in a classroom
 Nowadays classroom teaching makes
use of many classical and more
recent tools, such as blackboards,
video, overhead and digital
projectors connected to computers.
 A problem with presenting learning
material this way is that learners
cannot easily reproduce the lecture
content and the lecturing sequence
in the same way a teacher does
during a lecture because the
elements originate from different
media sources and some of the
elements are difficult to
copy/distribute.
 Even when the distribution issue is
solved, proper cataloguing, search,
and “wrapping” into a context are
often missing.

6. 4. Slideshows causing information fragmentation
 There is a common tendency among educators to present content in the
form of Power Point slides.
 Notes taken by students during such lectures, are often fragmentary and
do not allow to easily reproduce the presentation sequence.
 This is mainly because the lecture presentations are not done fully in the
classical blackboard-based way.
 Nowadays, when the slide shows have dominated lecture rooms, students
 have to read lecture notes written by teachers or buy books in order to
reconstruct the sequence of the teachers’ lecture presentation.
 A conclusion from the said above is that the slide shows do not serve as
well for students as they do for teachers, because teachers tend to
 use the slide-shows as a support for their own presentation sequence
without much focus on the students’ need of learning about topic details.
 A typical slide show contains keywords and headlines, and the rest of
information is presented orally or on a blackboard.
 This presentation segmentation constitutes a considerable problem for
students when they have to connect all the separate elements in one.

7. 4. Analogue vs. digital distribution
 The energy technology field and
especially turbomachinery has been
traditionally a high-tech engineering
area.
 Because of high complexity of product-
development and production chains the
industrial area pioneered adoption of
digital data management.
 Thus a lot of information from the area
has the digital form from the beginning.
 Therefore there is an opportunity for
the university environment to
extend academic learning resources
by reuse what the industry might
offer.
 Digital distribution considerably enlarges
accessibility of resources on- and
offcampus learning.
 But the experience shows that much of
valuable material is not digitized or is
digitized in multiple non-compatible
formats.

8. 6. Stages to develop an education platform

9. Conclusion
 A Race to Develop a Platform for
Education
 There are still debates about what exactly
we mean when we talk about Internet "
platforms" -- is it a matter of
infrastructure, extensibility, code
execution, content control, delivery
mechanisms, and so on. And debates
about which companies rise to that level
-- does Facebook? (Yes.) Does Twitter?
(Maybe.)