A Study on Technology-Enhanced Mulsemedia Learning for Enhancing Learner's Experience in E-Learning

Multimedia makes e-learning more interactive, which helps learners to remember information for a long time. The role of multimedia in education is to create content in an interactive format using videos, images, audio, and animation that enhance the interests of the learners and the learning process. However, the human sense covers more than two media senses. Mulsemedia denotes Multiple sensorial media that combines more than one sense (i.e., visual, hearing, haptic, gustatory, air flow, water jet, and olfactory), which helps to provide a more interactive and immersive learning experience instead of traditional multimedia learning styles in e-learning. In this paper, a study has been conducted on the possibility of including mulsemedia effects such as olfactory, airflow, and haptic effects in e-learning, and analyzing the learner's satisfaction through Quality of Experience (QoE) with and without Mulsemedia effects. For this preliminary study, two pieces of audio content have been created with multimedia and mulsemedia effects. This work initially experimented with 10 participants who are under and post-graduate students with the help of a self-recorded QoE form. Moreover, learners' stress level has been analyzed with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) when using Mulsemedia in e-learning. The results show that the usage of Mulsemedia in e-learning enhanced the learner experience and had a significant impact on learners' performance compared to traditional learning methods and participants recommend this kind of learning in future e-learning environments.