Thomas Waitz

MECCA-learn: a community based collaborative course management system for media-rich curricula in the film studies

Even with a large number of course management systems at the market and already established in some universities, impact of these systems on the curricula design in the humanities and the cultural sciences is still marginal. Instead of complaining about the reluctance against technology in the non-technical disciplines we try to contribute to establishing an e-learning culture in these faculties. First we introduce on the one hand existing theories on knowledge creation and social learning in information systems research and on the other hand media-specific theories developed in the humanities. By combining these both approaches we achieve a deeper understanding of the underlying scientific methodologies and information systems needs. Then we analyze the existing course management systems in the humanities and the cultural sciences with respect to these requirements. Our study indicates that no course management system covers all of these needs. Thus, we introduce MECCA-learn on top of the Movie E-learning Combination and Categorization Application (MECCA) as a basic course management system. It is deployed for a web based community of learners in a media-rich curriculum that allows a tight interaction between multimedia artifacts, their situational context and discourses on them.