Multimedia Databases in Educational Complexes: Challenges and Opportunities

Databases play an important role in today’s multimedia projects, providing efficient storage, management and access to multimedia data, as well as ensuring its reliability and integrity. Such projects provide an opportunity to create complex interdisciplinary projects for the integration of knowledge from various fields, the formation of a holistic vision of the problem, as well as the development of critical thinking and communication skills of students of higher education. The use of multimedia databases in the preparation of educational materials enriches the educational process with various formats and methods, and also contributes to the development of key competencies necessary for successful adaptation in the modern world. However, in addition to the advantages, the use of databases in multimedia projects is also associated with a number of problems, they are often not completely structured, different types of media files have different software requirements, database management systems require different information compression algorithms. Solving these problems requires a comprehensive approach, which includes the selection of appropriate database technology, the use of SMART components in the educational process, which opens up new prospects for the development of the educational process in the direction of STEM technologies. The purpose of the work is research and analysis of the impact of the use of multimedia databases on the preparation of educational products. In particular, the work is aimed at combining various modules of the software environment for studying individual disciplines, which contributes to a deeper and more complex understanding of the educational material. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were solved: first, the designed multimedia product was integrated into the Moodle educational complex; secondly, the connection of two types of database management systems is provided (Oracle SQL Developer — for control tasks that contain numerical values and their mathematical processing is expected; MongoDB — if the control task involves working with textual information). The paper examines the current problems of developing a multimedia educational complex based on SQL and NoSQL databases, which has high performance and scalability when used collectively. The tasks of integrating the multimedia product into the Moodle educational complex and connecting the necessary databases to the educational module are being solved. A methodology for assessing knowledge assimilation using the entropy level is proposed. The authors note that the use of multimedia databases enriches the educational process and contributes to the development of key student competencies necessary for successful adaptation in society.