Improving the learning performance by exploiting multimedia in eXtreme apprenticeship

From prior studies on eXtreme Apprenticeship (XA), it can be seen that XA has emerged as an innovative and effective educational approach. The technology in computer science evolves rapidly and XA tackles the gap between University education and industry development. Additionally, distance learning by multimedia is more and more important, sometimes even becoming necessary. As a result, this paper intends to study how to integrate XA and multimedia to improve the learning performance in computer science, with particular reference to the programming courses. Since computer science is mostly driven by the new applications, XA and multimedia are considered to be effective and efficient to reduce the cognitive efforts by practical demonstration. The experimental results, based on the case study of the operating systems course at the Bachelor’s level, show that exploiting multimedia in XA can significantly improve the learning performance in terms of grade distributions, reliability, knowledge transfer and student satisfaction with respect to more traditional approaches based on frontal lectures.