Applications of Multimedia and Web Page Design
Eli Collins-Brown, Online Faculty
University of Phoenix
| Syllabus |
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Week 1 – Overview of Web Design and MultimediaObjectives
Read Chapters 1-3 in Multimedia: Making it Work. Read the Electronic Reserve Readings for this week. Please survey the listed articles and read the ones you feel will be helpful to you this week. Projects: Individual Project - Web Site Analysis. See the project page for more details. Learning Team Project – Teams are assigned by the Thursday of the first week. Please go the Teams page and start working on the Learning Team Charter. Check the Calendar for specific due dates for all assignments, both individual and team. Please take a moment to fill out the Student Information Form. This form will give me some basic information about your knowledge and experience with creating web pages, information that I can use to help guide you in this course. As we begin this course in Applications of Multimedia and Web Page Design, let’s begin with clearly defining what we mean by multimedia. Webster’s New World dictionary defines it as: 1. A combination of media, as film, tape recordings,
slides, and special lighting effects, used for entertainment or
education Media can be defined as different channels of communication. A single form is a medium. Over the past few decades, multimedia has expanded to usually mean computer-based technology that incorporates multiple media segments. Elements of Multimedia When we think of the traditional classroom, we can generally think of quite a few methods of communication: • Textbooks and other print materials Even though all of these types of media can be used in the face-to-face classroom, it is important to note that these very same media can also be used in computer-based learning environments. The important distinction is that some of these types are much more interactive than others, meaning that the student can interact with the medium in a meaningful way that may increase understanding and comprehension. Can you determine which types might be included in this group of interactive media? Learning Theories and Multimedia Whether you are designing instruction for the classroom or for computer-based learning, the starting point is the same. You must first understand the underlying principles of how people learn. But this is not an exact science; in fact, there is no universal agreement on how learning occurs. The field of education psychology changed drastically throughout the 20th century. Even though Behavioral, Cognitive, and Constructivist psychology are the three main theories that have been developed, many learning psychologists, educators, and instructional designers today use a combination of all three. Regardless of which theory is subscribed to, successful instruction consists of specific steps: Instruction is presented and/or skills are modeled. The learner is guided through the first stages of new skills or new information. The learner practices the new skills in order to retain information. Learning is assessed. When designing multimedia instruction, we can take from each of these theories and build in programmed instruction with observable behaviors as outcomes, interactions that engage the learner in active learning and knowledge construction, learner-controlled activities, instructional strategies that allow for individual needs, and emphasis on computer-based tools such as word-processors and spreadsheets among other. How do you begin? Probably the best way is to start
with the simple concepts and move to the more complex. You also
want to consider all possible approaches that best meet the needs
of the learner. • Instructional Design and Learning Theory
- paper by Brenda Mergel from May, 1998. Planning as an Important Starting Point I can’t emphasize enough the importance of planning before you start designing any project. Our tendency is to ‘jump in’ and get started, but without planning you will soon find you have a mess on your hands and it will take much more time to work yourself out of it and try to organize it after the fact than it would if you had taken the time to plan first. Here is a series of questions to use in guiding you through the planning process: Scope – what needs to be learned? Audience – what are the important learner
characteristics? Resources - What are the constraints? Cost – what is the cost of the project? Specifications – what is the written plan
for the project? What is the standards manual or style guide for the project? What other resources are needed? What legal considerations need to be considered (such a client sign-off, etc) I’ll give you an example of a poorly planned project that I witnessed. The developer group was given a project to create six modules of self-paced software training for high school teachers who just received laptops from their district. The original details of the project were: They were to develop all six modules in one year. The desired skill level to be attained was beginning to intermediate. They wanted it self-paced and self-served so that the individual teachers could proceed through the modules on their own time and at their own speed, but they would be externally tested by the school district. The actual project took 2 ½ years to develop and ended up covering not only basic skills but also advanced skills (possibly why it took more time to develop) and they decided to put it on a CD to be self-serving. Besides missing their deliverable date, one of the biggest problems they discovered is that the laptops only had 64 Mb of RAM and the media they used to develop the modules tied up all of the available RAM a quarter of the way through any given module. Essentially it would freeze and then crash the machine. Why this mess? They failed to properly identify their audience, only consulting the technology coordinator and not any of the teachers themselves. They failed to jointly identify exactly what were basic, intermediate and advanced level skills, so what they thought were intermediate skills (because they are all technically advanced users) actually were determined to be advanced skills. Ultimately they ended up spending 30 – 45% of the development time creating lessons for skills that didn’t need to be taught. They failed to test out a prototype section of a lesson on a laptop with the same hardware and software configuration as the teachers’ laptops, so they never discovered that their modules used up the entire RAM so quickly. This was discovered after they had already burned AND distributed over 100 CDs. There were other small details but needless to say the time and cost overruns on this project were enormous. It took them almost as much time to redo everything as it did for them to create it in the first place. This development group most likely never got another project of this type again, which is unfortunate because the quality of the actual modules that they built was excellent! They all had superb interactions with high quality graphics and audio. It was unfortunate that no one could watch an entire lesson all the way through. This was a huge failure, just because they didn’t take the time and initiative to do a good job of planning up front. Planning first makes for a better project with better outcomes. References: Check the Calendar for due dates. To get us into this course and thinking about design and media, please answer all of the following:
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