Testing the Knowledge Gained in Multimedia-enhanced Learning

New forms and techniques of teaching based on the Internet and on multimedia have appeared in recent years. In the teleteaching project Virtual University of the Upper Rhine Valley (VIROR), many Java-based teaching modules were developed for the topic Compression Techniques and the DCT and given to the students in supplement to their theory classes. In the present paper, an evaluation of the efficiency of these modules is presented. In an experiment on traditional learning versus multimedia-enhanced learning, not only the motivation, but also the objective knowledge gain by students was measured. The students were assigned to different learning settings: One group of students attended a lecture, while others participated in computer-based training. Different quality attributions amidst this second group entailed significant differences in the knowledge gain, despite the identical learning content. This encourages some postulations on the attribution for university teaching software, which we suggest in this paper.