Abstract:

This paper describes research conducted part of the EU Horizon 2020-funded project NEWTON. The project focuses on devising diverse new technologies which improve students’ quality of learning when used in their technology-enhanced education. The NEWTON adaptive multimedia delivery solution enables students to access learning materials while adjusting the transmission of content according to user operational environment. A pilot was run in Dublin City University involving 42 undergraduate students with the aim of investigating how multimedia adaptation can affect their knowledge acquisition.

Adaptation techniques have already been used in learning environments, particularly for video streaming of e-learning content over the Internet. Several industry and academic researchers have proposed relevant solutions to address the associated quality problems through video streaming while satisfying different requirements in terms of users’ quality of experience given the constraints of the transmission environment. Multimedia adaptation refers to changing some parameters of a media component such as bit rate and/or resolution in case of video during the streaming process. NEWTON adaptive multimedia delivery solution based on the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP technologies and was used to deliver real learning content in a class with the goal of maintaining high user quality of experience by performing content delivery adjustment according to existing delivery network conditions.

Various questionnaires have been used to collect students’ data, including demographics, use of Internet access technologies and frequency of watching movies. Based on this data, the students were divided into subgroups based on their age, gender, wearing glasses and frequency of watching movies. The results of the experiment show that there is a knowledge gain improvement after using multimedia adaptation. This was the same for students who need to wear glasses, students from different age groups, genders, and students with various exposure to movies. Statistically, there was an increase between pre- and post- multimedia stages of the age subgroups below 20 years old by 41.15%, between 20 and 30 years old by 41.86% and above 30 years by 60.56%. There is a clear increase in learning outcome for both gender subgroups as follows: for females by 55.13% and for males by 43.87%. Likewise, an increase for students who watch movies once or twice a week by 45.06% and for students who watch movies once a month by 59.92%. In terms of networks, an increase of Wi-Fi by 49.75% and an increase of 3G/4G by 77.53%, whereas Ethernet with a cable got a slight increase of only 5.43%. However, an obvious increase for students wearing glasses by 48.02% and for the students who do not by 45.71% was important. One limitation of this study is that it was conducted on a relatively small group of population, although this is natural for such pilot studies. Nonetheless, the results reflect that there is room for incorporating adaptive multimedia in education with great results in the future.

Keywords:

Knowledge gain, adaptation, Multimedia.