Rapid development of media-rich, interactive elearning

This paper describes how the UCD Audio Visual Centre developed tools to help the UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science to increase the quantity and improve the quality of its elearning materials. The Medical School wished to create pedagogically sound learning materials without converting the lecturers into elearning developers. In particular, there was an interest in making greater use of images and digital media, encouraging the students to reflect on their learning and in developing case studies on the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Any tool had to be suitable for use by medical lecturers with limited IT experience. Having evaluated the available software, a decision was made to develop a tool in-house. For reasons of portability, the tool was to tag content in XML and be SCORM conformant.