ICT in Education

Thoughts on: Designing an interactive multimedia treatment (Schwier & Misanchuk 1993)

September 8, 2007

Schwier, R.A. and Misanchuk, E.R. (1993). Interactive Multimedia Instruction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Chapter 9, pp.155-192.

This is a fairly wordy section on a quite specific aspect of the process of designing interactive multimedia so I’m just going to scan for salient quotes. (I’m a little tired

“Given the capability of multimedia systems to house massive quantities of information and to construct complex delivery systems, it seems reasonable to encourage the development of instructional systems which contain mre than a single cognitive orientation. In this way, the designer can impose consistency between the cognitive orientation and different learning tasks, and also capitalise on the possibility of designing instruction which is compatible with learning styles and preferences”

I won’t quote it but there’s a pretty good summation of the differences between the behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist philosophies and approaches in this chapter.

They then move on to look at options for specifying content.

“Many projects will result in a glut of information you need to organise. In fact, one can argue that instructional design is largely the process of organising rather than creating, opportunities for learning”

The Content Outline is a suggested approach, consisting of a set of objectives for the course, the content necessary to achieve them and the treatment that the the content might be given. (How it is presented)

From here, Design specifications are quite useful – simple things to ensure consistency across the multimedia product- These might be broken into technical standards, instructional formats and aesthetic considerations.

Technical standards could look at issues like:

• Writing style
• Screen format (eg a single idea to a screen of text)
• Grammar (eg no contractions to be used)
• Numbering
• Layout restrictions
• Abbreviations

Instructional formats could consider:

• Strategy (e.g scenarios with background reading)
• Menu Organisation (advanced organisers)
• Length of segments (time allocated to activities)
• Reading level
• Test-like events
• feedback

Aesthetic considerations:

• Screen text (font + size)
• Color
• Computer vs video
• music
• illustrations
• visual cues

From here, Misanchuk & Schwier see the next step as setting up the framework for the content.

This takes five forms.

Core instruction: introductory segments (what’s to come, objectives) + core instruction (the primary content) + summary segments (reinforcing key points)

Complementary instruction:  help segments (rephrasing or embellishing core instruction) + remedial segments (filling in scaffolding knowledge that should already be there) + additional information (enriching but not essential extra info). (Complementary instruction shouldn’t appear by default but should be easily accessible if it is needed)

Management elements:  quizzes, games, scenarios which offer feedback (or assessment)

Navigation elements: easy access to all sections of content, global escape route, “you are here” type maps

Interactive elements:  immediacy of response, non-sequential access of information, adaptability, feedback, options, bi-directionality and interruptability (pause and escape options and context sensitive help)

“For interaction to be dynamic, it is necessary to build content for the varied directions the instruction may follow.This means developing a great deal of content which any particular learner may never see.”

From here, Schwier and Misanchuk move on to the matter of allowing learners to practice their new knowledge in the multimedia environment. They outline some generalised principles for this:

• practice during instruction should be varied, not constant
• as familiarity with the learning task increases, so should the difficulty of practice increase
• learners should be weaned from prompts as their facility with knowledge or skills increases
• use practice often during the early stages of learning and gradually lengthen the space between practice sessions on a particular topic as instruction progresses
• for some types of learning, practice should progress from accuracy to speed to automaticity
• review segments can be used successfully in place of questions
• feedback should identify the successful and the unsuccessful features of the interaction and describe why incorrect responses or omissions are insufficient
• learners can benefit from memory or organisational strategies to make information more meaningful
• practice events should require learners to use information and discover and derive new relationships in information
• practice should be designed to motivate learners

Learner control:

There are a range of areas that learners might control in a multimedia product:

•  which content they access
• the method it is presented in
• whether they access supplementary material
• the order they access the content
• how much practice they undertake
• level of difficulty of exercises undertaken

They finish up the chapter by looking at some different studies on what happens when learners use multimedia products in groups – some show that retention is the same for singles as pairs but drops off with 3 or more in the group while other studies don’t. (But the 2 vs 3+ thing seems to make a certain amount of sense – hard to cram three people around a screen for one thing)

Entry Filed under: 913, constructivism, e-learning, education design, information landscape, learning environment, multimedia, pedagogy, strategies, technology. .