An interactive learning environment for information and communication theory

Abstract

Interactive learning tools are emerging as effective educational materials in the area of computer science and engineering. It is a research domain that is rapidly expanding because of its positive impacts on motivating and improving students' performance during the learning process. This paper introduces an interactive learning environment for teaching and learning information and communication theory and related courses. The environment integrates several modules to meet the students' different learning styles. It contains a movie-like module, an animated hypertext introductory module that fully explains the fundamental concepts of information and communication theory. Besides those important learning modules, it also contains a self-assessment module that contains a set of interactive tests and examinations. Learners can use the environment as a standalone application or as an applet from within any web browser. Some evaluation experiments and comparative analyses of the results were performed to measure the performance of our environment in the classroom.