Using Multimedia Activities for Homework and in-Class Exercises to improve the results of university students

A regular subject of a degree course can be split into 4 main parts: Lecturing classes, hands-on skills, homework exercises and in-class exercises. There are many researches on lecturing classes and hands-on skills and, although there are many related with homework and in-class exercises, they are focused on the methodology more than of the type of media used to perform them. Homework and in-class exercises have the objective of the reinforcement of the knowledge learned in lecture classes. Generally, these problems or exercises are presented written in a paper or, sometimes, in an electronic format using a word processor or pdf. Despite of the type of exercise or problems proposed for the students, we suggest the use of multimedia activities as a medium to propose these exercises. In this paper we will show different kind of multimedia activities that can be used for homework and in-class exercises. This classification will allow us to choose the type of multimedia activity depending on the type of knowledge that it is wanted to transfer to the student. These multimedia activities have been used in the subjects “Redes de Área Local” and “Integración de Redes” that are lectured in the third course of the Telecommunications Technical Engineering in the higher Polytechnic School of Gandia of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. We will show the measurements taken from a questionnaire presented to the students and we will discuss their results obtained. We will also compare the marks of the students in both subjects in the last two course years. Key-Words: Multimedia Activities, Homework, Lecturing classes exercises, TICs for the education.