Powerful multimedia authoring tools now becoming available permit engineering educators to develop multimedia courseware with much less effort than ever before. Without familiarity with the principles of instruction design, it is easy for engineering educators to run amuck and produce ineffective multimedia instructional materials. The goal of this workshop is to instruct 30 educators who teach engineering or pre-engineering the basics of instructional design, particularly as applied to multimedia instructional materials in engineering. The workshop sessions will be taught largely by an experienced instructional designer who is also experienced in teaching mathematics and science in the classroom, as well as commercial courses in multimedia instructional design. SIMPLE, a powerful but easy-to-use software construction environment developed with partial support from an NSF Course and Curriculum Development Project, will serve as one of the tools. Multimedia courseware from the NSF-supported coalitions will be introduced as examples. The workshop team consists of members from ExperTech, a small software company, Amarillo College, a two year institution, and Texas Tech University, a doctoral institution. The team members will interact extensively with the participants throughout the 2-year period by means of a special mailing list on the Internet. Besides communication at conferences, an FTP site on the Internet will permit easy distribution of developed software. The workshop participants will be instructed in the basics of evaluation methodologies throughout the workshop so that they can effectively evaluate the courseware they use or develop.
