Today's engineering colleges must attract, retain, and accommodate the various learning styles of a diverse student body, including more women, underrepresented minorities, older students, and part-time students than ever before. Doing so requires the development of improved teaching methods and restructured curricula. Modern information technology, especially interactive multimedia, shows great promise for supporting improvements in teaching and curricula directed at meeting this goal. For that promise to be fulfilled, faculty must see how instructional technology can be used creatively and effectively, and the resources for using it in lecture halls, classrooms, and study halls must be readily accessible to faculty and students. At this school, over the past several years, faculty interest and expertise in multimedia courseware have developed to the extent that current teaching facilities will no longer support the demand for either developing or delivering such courseware. The equipment acquired for this project is creating the facilities to allow faculty to move to the next level of instructional technology, undertaking substantially more extensive and sophisticated courseware development projects than they can now. Funds are being used to equip, first, a multimedia courseware studio and, second, an interactive multimedia classroom which will be open long hours and also be used as a multimedia study hall when not scheduled for group and section meetings. The immediate audience for this project includes faculty and undergraduates in all departments at the College of Engineering. Through electronic publishing (via the NEEDS Database and World Wide Web), the courseware being developed will ultimately be available to engineering faculty and students throughout the world.
