A combined approach to the creation of multimedia teaching programs allows to combine opportunities of prompt edition modification using Internet resources with high volumes and saturation with audio and video materials characteristic for CD-editions.
Electronic manual "History of Russia: the 20th century" consists of 4 CDs and a brochure. It includes 278 multimedia lectures (over 24 academic hours of announcer's text, over 6000 illustrations, over two hours of news films with sound track). Studies of each of 54 paragraphs end with testing and marking (over 1200 tests, crosswords, etc.) The course is supplemented with a comprehensive reference material: over 700 personalia; detailed chronology, dictionary of terminology, over 30 animated maps, over 700 documents, over 70 sound documents. There is a full-text retrieval system. The course has been approved by the Federal Expert Council, Committee for Science and Education under State Duma of the Russian Federation, Moscow Bureau of UNESCO. This is the first and so far the only electronic edition included in the federal list of RF manuals. The course is widely and successfully used in the educational process. In 1998 and 1999 the course was twice declared "the best teaching program in humanities" (according to polls among over 1500 specialists at the International Conference Exhibition "Information Technologies in Education").
One of the reasons making multimedia teaching programs less attractive is that editors have to postpone issue of new updated versions until the previous CD edition is sold out. Under restricted solvent demand this process takes years. On the other hand, Internet, due to its low throughput capacity, cannot become a real instrument of delivery of voluminous multimedia teaching programs to a great number of users so far. In such conditions the only solution is to create hybrid CD-Internet products, in which the initial version of the publication is supplied on CDs, while the teaching program is continuously updated by way of regular deliveries of relatively small updating volumes via Internet (or other channels, up to diskettes).
Unfortunately, as far as we know, none of the universal software shells designated for quick development of multimedia electronic editions provides for such updating.
We have developed our own software shell. Edition updating technology implemented therein is very simple: a program recorded to a CD finds a fresher version of itself on the hard disk and transfers control to this new version. A similar procedure is used in choosing scripts controlling the process of teaching, illustrations and so on. First, the hard disk is checked, if a new version of a particular file is found, it is this version that will be used. The course updating procedure implies Internet loading and one-time start-up of self-extracting archives with new files. As a result of this the old version of the electronic edition transforms into a new improved one in a manner, which is absolutely "transparent" to the user. These improvements may be quite radical and their nature is not predetermined in any way.
The course is updated monthly free of charge and displayed at the www.history.ru site: the course is supplemented with new materials (documents, personalia, illustrations), chronological table is constantly expanded, etc.); the program is improved methodically, its interactivity is stepped up, as well as efficiency of the knowledge assessment system.
For example, the number of questions in the final test has been increased notably (two- or three-fold). Thus, the updated version of the program offers a different set of questions to the student at each try, raising authenticity of the knowledge standard assessment.
In-class tasks added to the course allow to control the students knowledge more efficiently, orient them to serious work, concentrate their attention on key problems, facts that may be poorly comprehended in case of passive listening to the educational material. At the same time in-class tasks make the program operation process more dynamic and game-like.