An interdisciplinary approach to multimedia systems education: the Otago experience

Multimedia Information Systems is an interdisciplinary, fourth-year course jointly taught by staff from the Departments of Information Science and Design Studies at the University of Otago. One key feature of the course is that students from both departments are grouped into inter-disciplinary teams to build a multimedia system prototype. It was found that this arrangement fostered thinking about unconventional designs and an attitude towards pushing the bounds of practicality in systems development. This and other observations, lessons learnt during the first year of teaching this course, and a discussion of the rationale behind the curriculum of the course is the subject of the paper.