The Concept of Computer-Based Multimedia

This course that you are reading is a good example of the extensive use of multimedia technology. Essentially we have used our knowledge of you, our students, to design this course. You are mostly practicing teachers or at the minimal have some experience of teaching and therefore you will bring your own experience in teaching to further improve your knowledge. Besides this knowledge we also consider it important to engage as many of your sensory faculties, e.g. hearing and seeing, in the learning experience and we wanted you to be active in your learning.

From our point of view this strategy reflects the constructivist (Unit 1.4) view of learning, i.e., the multimedia format allows you to interact. The level of interactivity is dependent on many factors, including the availability of appliances, the amount of bandwidth available, the skills of both learners and teachers to use the technologies, and of course, the expanse of it all. In an ideal situation interactivity would permit the user to clicking a site and accessing text or videos, completing worksheets, teacher and learner performing an activity together and teachers and learners actively engage in a discussion.

All of this means that in designing a course, teachers are expected to pay considerable attention to the importance of the learning process. Experience tells us that instructional multimedia must attend to the learners and grab their attention, organise the material in such a way that it assists the learner in finding the relevant information, and help the learner integrate this acquired information into her own knowledge base. Putting this together is a complex process and there are number of authoring tools in the market (PowerPoint is one of them). In using these authoring tools to design a lesson or course, teachers should ensure that the multimedia course support five features, namely: screen design; learner control and navigation; use of feedback; interactivity; and visual and audio elements. These are shown in Table 3.2 below.

Features

Principles

Screen design

  • Focus the learner's attention
  • Develop and maintain interest
  • Promote processing
  • Promote engagement between the learner and lesson content
  • Help the learners find and organise information
  • Facilitate lesson navigation

Interaction

  • Provide opportunities for interaction
  • Break up and organise the content into chunks or sections and build in questions and summaries
  • Ask questions but avoid interrupting the instructional flow
  • Use rhetorical questions to get students' to think about content and to stimulate curiosity
  • Provide for active exploration in the program rather than a linear sequence

Feedback

  • Keep feedback on the same screen as the response
  • Provide feedback immediately following a response
  • Provide feedback to verify correctness
  • Tailor feedback to the individual
  • Provide encouraging feedback
  • Allow students to print feedback

Navigation

  • Clearly define procedures for navigation and support
  • Keep consistency in screen structure and location of keys
  • Use familiar icons on control panels
  • Include a progress map or chart to show location within a program
  • Help segments with additional information to allow a learner to follow individual interests and construct his or her own learning experiences

Learner control

  • Provide selectable areas for users to access information
  • Allow users to access information in a user-determined order
  • Provide maps so students can find their locations and allow students to jump to locations
  • Provide feedback if there are to be time delays on accessing information
  • Arrange information so users are not overwhelmed by the quantity of information
  • Provide visual effects and give visual feedback

Colour

  • Use colour sparingly and consistently with a maximum of three to six colours per screen
  • Use brightest colours for most important information
  • Use neutral colours for backgrounds and dark colours on a light background for text
  • Avoid combining complementary colours (e.g. red/green)
  • Use commonly accepted colours for particular actions (red for stop)
  • Avoid hot colours on the screen as they appear to pulsate

Graphics

  • Use graphics including photos and scanned pictures icons and photos, which will enhance menu screens
  • Supplement information with graphics so it is better understood and retained by the learner
  • Avoid graphics for decoration or for 'special effects'
  • Use graphics to indicate choices (e.g. left/right arrows)

Animation

  • Can be motivational and attention getting
  • Useful for the explanation of dynamic processes
  • Provides subtle benefits by highlighting key information, heightening interesting, and facilitating recall

Audio

  • Use audio when the message is short and audio rather than text for long passages
  • Do not let audio compete with text or video presentation
  • Provide headphones for in-class use
  • Tell students what is relevant and chunk the message with other instructional activities

Video

  • Use video as an advance organiser or a summation
  • Synchronise video with content, and reinforce/repeat the concepts being presented

Table 3.2 Main features of multimedia and associated design principles Source: Diezmann, Carmel M and Watters, James J (2002)

The WWW today is filled with freely available multimedia content for teachers. There are also many others that are produced and marketed by commercial enterprises. Whether indigenously produced or acquired from the marketplace, three questions require a response. These are:

  1. What constitutes good quality material?
  2. How effective is the construct of the course as an effective learning tool?
  3. How credible is the content in terms of meeting the requirement of your curriculum?
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