Developing Dynamic Educational Material with Integrated Mathematical Notation for Web-based E-learning System

1 Iztok Humar, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Tržaška 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, [email protected] Abstract – World Wide Web is a dynamic medium that offers simple distribution of interactive materials and multimedia contents. This is especially useful in education, where the ability to reveal extra information on demand is an excellent tool for stimulating and engaging students. At the Laboratory for Telecommunications at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia we have developed and implemented our own e-learning system that supports any Web-based content. Repeatedly requests from several fields of natural science to use our e-learning platform motivated us to develop a strategy for preparing and publishing dynamic and interactive sketches synchronized with mathematical equation derivation and other multimedia elements – sound and video. The developed approach is based on experiences of the Department of Electromagnetics from the same faculty, which have published more than 2000 solved problems as static pages on the Web since 1997. Having limited financial and human resources, we decided to use readily available technologies: Macromedia Flash for animations, Design Science WebEQ to dynamically present equations and Input Control integrated with Question Mark for preparing mathematical questions and reporting on assessments. We did not only employ the stated techniques in our e-learning system, but we also added some important new functionality, most notably the synchronization between steps of animation, corresponding equations, sound and other multimedia elements supported by our e-learning system. All these elements are controlled by common navigation controls. We would like to share our experience with developing dynamic interactive multimedia educational material with integrated mathematical notation, because we believe such an application is not limited to our e-learning platform and could be useful in other fields of science and technology.