Teaching Multimedia Documents to LIS Students

Multimedia documents (MMDs) are connected to education in two different ways: future professionals have to be educated to perform the complex task of multimedia creation, and multimedia is also successfully used in various phases of the educational process. This paper focuses on education for multimedia from the point of view of four of its different aspects: technology, design, purpose and content. The present status of education for multimedia is illustrated by an analysis of the academic scene in Serbia and neighboring countries, as well as through some other illustrative examples. The results of this analysis show that the content aspect of multimedia is covered mainly in the Library and Information Science (LIS) curricula. We present the place of the obligatory course Multimedia Document in the LIS curriculum at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. It is organized as a team project of a whole generation of students in the last year of their studies, where each generation has to tackle a different topic important from the perspective of preservation of cultural heritage and present it in a multimedia form. In this paper, we show how successful this approach has been, both from teachers' and students' point of view. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.