1. Interactive multimedia makes Behaviourist learning strategies more engaging.

The use of simple online games and quizzes provides positive reinforcement to learners and adds interest to subjects which focus on fact based learning by bringing variety and heightened sensory experiences to repetitive tasks.

Robyler and Havriluk (1997) point out that among the “needs addressed by directed instruction” (their term for the Behaviourist approach) are “making learning paths more efficient… especially for instruction in skills that are prerequisite to higher-level skills” and “performing time-consuming and labor intensive tasks (e.g., skill practice), freeing teacher time for other, more complex student needs”.

This has been demonstrated in a project undertaken in the Learning Medical Terminology subject at the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT). A range of vocabulary learning exercises have been turned into simple drill and practice online games, making them more fun and interactive.

Anecdotal evidence from the teacher of the subject indicates that students now learn and retain the words more quickly and complain less about the subject.

This heuristic is useful to me as a learning resource developer at CIT as we are part of the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector and many of the initial subjects in our courses require learners to acquire a certain base level of technical subject-specific knowledge. Many of these games can be produced easily by teachers with free or inexpensive software and require minimal technical ability to create and put online.

I chose to write about it as I am a firm believer in the educational possibilities of interactive multimedia, particularly in the form of games and quizzes. Games are a familiar, accessible and engaging medium which can be used in situations ranging from Behaviourist drill and practice exercises to more Constructivist problem based scenarios. There is currently a growing group of educational game producers – known as the Serious Games movement – focusing heavily on the possibilities of the latter.

Learning practitioners wishing to make use of interactive multimedia in the form of games and quizzes should allow themselves adequate time to become familiar with the game/quiz creating software that they wish to use. While most of it is designed with the less technically inclined user in mind (i.e. a wizard based approach), it can often still require the uploading of multiple supporting image and javascript files to your website or learning management system.

References:

Robyler, M. D., Edwards, J., & Havriluk, M. A. (1997). Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching (pp. 54-79). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Simpson, C., (2005). Medical Terminology – Prefixes and Suffixes. Retrieved 23/7/2007 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTfs4axi1YU

Ertmer, P.A. & Newby, T.J. (1993). Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 6(4), 50-72. (abstract)

Oliver, R. & Herrington, J. (2001) Teaching and Learning Online (p.52) Western Australia, Edith Cowan University

In spite of the fact that the guide to writing heuristics itself says that collecting them isn’t “academically respectable”, they are evidently worth investigating as convenient summaries of “the truth” of a theory or body of knowledge.

This is what the guide has to say about writing them:

Structuring your heuristics

Use the following structure to set out each heuristic:

Heuristic statement

• State the issue in a single, active sentence.

Explanation

• Provide an explanation in support of your statement of up to 500 words for each heuristics covering the following:
  • Expand on your statement above to explain what it means in more detail
  • Explain the background to the topic by including references to the relevant concepts from the literature using the correct referencing style
  • Explain what the heuristic means in practice and give examples if appropriate
  • Explain why this is a useful heuristic in your context as a learner, teacher or designer
  • Explain why the issue is important to you, in other words why did you choose to write about it
  • Offer any practical suggestions you might have for other practitioners trying to implement the heuristic

References

• List all the references cited in your explanation as per the convention.

I have four of these bastards to do, God help us all

Extract: In recent years, the infusion of multimedia into teaching and learning has altered considerably the instructional strategy in our educational institutions and changed the way teachers teach and students learn.

The traditional teacher-centric method of teaching used for decades in our educational system has been modified and enhanced. Currently, modern education theory is moving from the traditional recall of facts, principles, or correct procedures into the areas of creative thinking, problem solving, analysis and evaluation. These are skills which are very much needed in today’s knowledge based economy.

This shift in focus on learning has presented Malaysian educators with serious challenges as well as opportunities in restructuring their curriculum to meet the rising demands of the knowledge based society, which is currently being initiated by the Malaysian Government.

In this paper, we focus on designing a course which is oriented towards a constructivist based paradigm by using multimedia as an instructional tool, and where students are active learners, involved in constructing their own knowledge in the learning process and determining how to reach their own learning outcomes.

A survey was carried out to ascertain the reactions of students enrolled in an interactive multimedia course in the Multimedia University, Malaysia towards this constructivist based learning mode. The results indicated that these students reacted positively towards this study mode and improved their interpersonal and collaborative learning skills.

My first response to this paper wasn’t a particularly positive one. As you can see from the extract, it is about the experiences of students in a constructivist situation (one where the learning is “built” by the student in a situation where they are presented with a problem as their assessment and make their own decisions about what they need to learn to solve it.)

It is also very much about how the use of multimedia is meant to slot into this constructivist model, with the students using audio, video, animation, interactive flash, images and more to create a final product that brings together everything that they have learnt.

The students then complete a questionnaire providing feedback on their enjoyment of the learning experience and how valuable they felt that using multimedia was in constructing their knowledge.

The problem here is that these are multimedia students at a multimedia school – this is a field that they want to work in and one which the Malaysian Government (and it seems the author of the paper) is very keen to develop in Malaysia.

Using students trained in the use of multimedia to determine the effectiveness of using multimedia as a learning tool seems an entirely questionable place to start in this instance. (Unsurprisingly, the students all felt that using multimedia helped them to learn).

In addition to this, the paper seems heavy on pro-constructivist rhetoric and light on concrete examples of how or why this practice actually supports learning.

Language such as “students obediently listen to the lecture” in describing conventional “chalk and talk” teaching seems slanted – the word “obediently“grates in particular as something regressive, something to be judged.

On the other hand, descriptions of the Constructivist model are all glowing and faultless – “students work individually or in small groups to explore, investigate and solve authentic problems and become actively engaged in seeking knowledge and information, rather than being passive recipients.”

(My personal belief is that a Constructivist approach can be highly effective and that learners will connect more strongly with knowledge that they have found – particularly after they have identified their own need to have it and found ways to relate it to their existing knowledge.)

The fact that learners were taught in a seemingly more conventional manner how to actually create the multimedia projects in the first place is quickly glossed over in a sentence – <blockquote> These students have no a priori knowledge in multimedia authoring and authoring tools and, therefore, were given lectures and tutorials to provide them with basic skills in multimedia application development. </blockquote>

I believe it is a rare occasion that an exclusively constructivist approach would be used in a classroom and while problem based learning is a great approach for autonomous learners and group-based learning, most students still expect a reasonable level of support from their teacher and for their teacher to be more knowledgable about the subject than they are.

Having students create multimedia resources to examine the usefulness of multimedia in a constructivist approach makes a lot of sense but seems to get too “meta” when the students are creating multimedia resources for the sake of creating multimedia resources. Their knowledge of the subject matter of the aforementioned multimedia resources apparently went up, which is certainly encouraging but given that the learning outcome was more focussed on the students developing product management and design skills, this seems somewhat irrelevant.

However

I’m meant to develop a Heuristic based on this article – not that I’m overly sure what a heuristic is meant to do – from the examples I’ve seen, it seems like a concise headline summary of a larger (400 words approx) summary of an idea contained in the article. The finer points of what a heuristic is, what it is for and so on appears to have been covered in the face to face classes of this subject -however as a distance student, I missed out. (The last time I asked a question about concept maps I was advised to google it on wikipedia – which I had already done incidentally – so I’m somewhat reluctant to ask again).

This leads me to the question – if I disagree with the approach to a subject that is covered in a paper, can I still pull a reasonable opinion/position from it which takes the shape of a heuristic.

The article has some interesting things to say about the purpose of the constructivist approach, I think this is the place to begin.

Update - ok, so there is actually a pretty reasonable looking guide to writing heuristics tucked away in the course content.

I might just post quickly about that too.