Teaching with Technology

“Using Multimedia with Blackboard for Graduate Courses in Teacher Education” by Muhammad K. Betz is an interesting article that argues that the use of multimedia benefits the distant learner. Professor Betz has based his arguments on a body of research on the effects of multimedia on education by Mayer R., a well known researcher, and some of his colleagues who have written and argued that “verbal explanations alone in instructional situations is less conducive to learning …. than … verbal explanations in conjunction with multimedia”
In this article, Professor Betz presents his review of the literature on the effects of multimedia in assisting the learning process in the distant learning environment. He further adds that since some research has indicated that face-to-face education is better rated than distance learning, educators involved in distance learning are required to research for ways to ”improve the quality of online courses” and to make distant learning more effective.
The use of Multimedia in online courses was not presented as a novelty but rather as a solution to a problem so as “to improve an existing practice”. This approach will allow teachers to find solutions that will provide the distant learners the optimal learning experience.
The introduction of multimedia modules in distant learning courses is burdensome because it requires additional layers of effort and production that further overloads the instructor. If these efforts are not done correctly, they may overload the students cognitive abilities. Nonetheless, if these efforts are properly designed and executed, research has presented strong evidence that multimedia helps learning of online students.
The article presents literature and experiments about the “two cognitive principles” related to multimedia and the way it enhances learning. These two principles are:
• “contiguity principle…states that the effectiveness of multimedia instruction increases when words and pictures are presented contiguously in time or space”
• “modality principle relates to the premise that auditory presentation results in higher recall than visual presentation”
The concept of meaningful learning that requires “deep processing” of information when combined with the use of multimedia may risk the possibility of “cognitive load” which is the overload that may result from the needed dual mental processing of verbal/auditory and visual/pictorial materials. Professor Betz has presented nine techniques to use so as to manage the needed dual processing of the input information without the risk of the feared mental overload. These nine techniques as presented in the article are:
1. Off-loading: or balancing input between the two channels;
2. Segmenting: or placing time segments between content segments;
3. Pretraining: or preinstructing students on content;
4. Weeding: or removing extraneous content;
5. Signaling: or placing coding clues into content;
6. Aligning: or optimally placing text and graphics;
7. Eliminating redundancy: or avoiding identical spoken and written content;
8. Synchronizing: or presenting related graphics and narration simultaneously;
9. Individualizing: or prescreening individual learners for required cognitive skills.
The use of multimedia such as Microsoft PowerPoint with the addition of a voice and/or video clips to the slides have shown to be effective in providing additional explanation to distant learning students who had struggled to understand text instruction materials that were presented alone. These findings were documented through the result of a survey of the students that have participated in the research. The results of the survey indicated that the use of Microsoft PowerPoint, with or without the integrated voice or video, has improved the students’ learning in the online course that was used to examine the effectiveness of multimedia use in distant learning instruction.

Hanan

Betz, M. (2005). Using multimedia with blackboard for graduate courses in teacher education: International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning , 2( 6), Retrieved from http://itdl.org/Journal/Jun_05/article05.htm doi: 1550-6908.