We had a lecture from John Conway, Learning Technologist at Imperial. He showed us how multimedia is used in higher education – I’m quite envious of the technology available to today’s students.

He showed us how lectures can be videotaped and put online with embedded links so that the students can skip to the parts that they are interested in.  The videos can be uploaded to the VLE to be watched whenever it suits the students.  Further links can be embedded in recorded lectures that will take the student to further information about a topic.
We learned that a series of lectures can be made available via RSS/podcasts.  Apparently this will become very useful if there is a Swine flu pandemic according to the article about how universities are preparing for Swine flu – see http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jul/23/universities-prepare-emergency-swine-flu-plans
The videos can have subtitles added for hearing impaired students and also a student can zoom in on one particular area of the video if they are visually impaired.
We saw a virtual oscilloscope that students can practice on before they are let loose on the real thing so this technology can be used to to demonstrate any kind of lab equipment before students are allowed to use the real thing.

A copy of John’s slides are at this link  http://www.slideshare.net/learning20/multimedia-in-higher-education