Abstract:

The University of Vigo has developed a number of educational projects oriented to involve teachers and students on the intensive use of new learning technologies as in grade as in postgraduate disciplines. For example, e-learning platforms or learning management systems were found by educators and students to be a friendly technology.
Nowadays, multimedia learning contents have reached an increasing demand by students. Many formats of multimedia contents were tested at the University of Vigo, such as live video and audio recording, live videoconferencing, telepresence. But after a few years of use, it has been observed that the most demanded by students and less rejected by teachers is the short-time mixed source learning content.
In this paper a knowledge pill is presented as an example of reusable learning object, which is a very useful resource on engineering teaching and other fields teaching. This multimedia resource gives student knowledge without having to attend lessons. These pills are generally designed to guide students through information or to help students perform in specific tasks. Their aims are convenience and flexibility to learners: the learning sessions are available twenty-four hours at day (24x7). Learners are not bound to a specific day/time to physically attend lessons. One important characteristic of the use of these pills is that there is no specific skill to be learned.
The Publication Multimedia Kit developed at the University of Vigo is described as a whole process toolkit to the make up process of one of this learning resources. In this case, Chemical Engineering basic concepts are presented in the learning pill from its concept to the final result including the necessary technologies to process all information data. In order to check its efficacy, statistics of use have been included. The results show that these new tools for improving the learning process are well received among the students.
In short, these pills supported by a powerful production distribution and publication tool as PuMuKit provides a highly efficient multimedia learning content generation system that enhance teaching especially in engineering.

Keywords:

Knowledge Pills, Reusable Learning Objects, Multimedia, Learning Contents.