A Low-Cost Approach to Do-It-Yourself Multimedia Courseware Development

Commercially produced educational software attempts to be informative as well as entertaining. While learning is more likely to occur if the process is fun, learning software or "courseware" which includes animation, video, and audio does not necessarily translate into effective student learning. Because students' expectations are influenced by network television, computer games, and "edutaining" software, finding the optimal mix of education and entertainment becomes complicated. The challenge for us is to develop multimedia courseware that is effective for learning, acceptable to media-sophisticated students, and cost effective in academic settings with limited resources.

This article presents one approach that was successfully applied by Dr. William Johnson at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) to create multimedia courseware for education students studying to become teachers. It describes the need for the projects such as this in general, as well as the goals, personnel, resources, procedures, and costs for a specific project.

The overall goal of the project was to provide student teachers with needed experiences prior to entering classrooms and give them a common frame of reference from which to discuss remedies for problems that they might encounter. Multimedia simulations were the perfect choice, because students could see situations that they might experience, try out various solutions, and observe the effects of their decisions without ever disrupting a real classroom. Using simulations is not an end in itself, but an integral component in courses including lectures, readings, and discussions. Consequently, the simulations were not intended to present new content as much as to provide opportunities for trying out various approaches to classroom discipline.

The simulations were produced by a team of graduate students enrolled in a four-week summer course entitled Secondary Education 490. The course instructor, Dr. William Johnson, an expert in the area of teacher training and instructional design, served as content expert and project coordinator. The team members typically had expertise in one or more areas: computer-assisted instruction, classroom teaching, or teacher education. As students in the College of Education, instructional design principles were an integral part of their academic training.

The simulations themselves were programmed in TenCORE and delivered on an IBM PC XT equipped with a MicroKey video-overlay board and a Pioneer LD-V1000 laser disk video player. Team members also had access to a classroom equipped with remote-controlled video cameras, editing equipment, and an experienced video technician who also served as a production consultant. Some or all of the above resources were used during each week of the project:

Week 1) learning the content areas

Week 2) planning and preparing materials

Week 3) videotaping

Week 4) integrating and testing materials

Dr. Johnson was flexible enough as course coordinator to allow beneficial changes and revisions even after plans had been completed. For example, the initial plan was to only present video scenarios in the simulation as had been done in previous projects. All other supporting materials were offline. Midway through the project, team members decided that it might be more efficient and interesting to also provide online information about the simulated pupils, teacher, school, and community. In addition, a dynamic rating scale was added to allow users to view how each pupil in the simulated class felt about the way that classroom problems were being handled. Although the changes required additional planning and work, by the end of the second week, the basic scenarios were written and pupils from a local high school were being recruited as actors.

On the following day, the high-school "actors" arrived for the recording. They were casually observed by Dr. Johnson, who made recommendations about casting. Rambunctious students, for example, were asked to play the roles of troublemakers; this was one way of assuring they acted naturally.

From Dr. Johnson's past experiences, scripted productions with amateur actors sounded stilted and resulted in many retakes because they frequently forgot their lines. Again, to encourage more natural acting, the scenes were directed using story outlines rather than scripts. In one scene, for example, a "student" was told to begin brushing her hair while other students were studying. The "teacher" was told to confiscate the brush, causing the student to become angry and complain that she was being picked on by the teacher. This approach allowed the actors to use their own words and focus on their behavior instead of the fact that they were being videotaped.

After the scenarios had been taped, the team members were given a short training session on how to use a video-editing console. Then, they edited the resulting videotape into a format suitable for making a videodisk and sent it to press.

Due to the short development time in the course and because student-teacher courses were held in the fall, the teams could neither observe student teachers using their work nor make content revisions. To resolve this problem, individual graduate students were hired to do the necessary field testing and program revisions.

The out-of-pocket costs for developing the simulation included approximately $200 to pay ten high-school actors at minimum wage and $300 to press the videodisk. Many of the other costs were hidden. UIUC provided equipment resources including video recording and editing facilities, and computer hardware, software, and peripherals. The video equipment used to produce Dr. Johnson's simulations can now be replaced by less expensive consumer camcorders, computer-based video-capture boards, and online editing software like that available at UIC's InfoTech Arcade.

In addition to hardware and software, individuals desiring to develop multimedia courseware must ensure that they, themselves, are qualified or that their institution has people who can support their instructional goals. Personnel are also required who can run the hardware while a project is being developed and while it is being delivered to students. This simulation relied heavily on the managerial skills and content expertise of Dr. Johnson, the instructional-design skills of Dr. Johnson and the team members, the video-recording experience of the video technician, and the computer-programming ability of the team members.

Dr. Johnson's knowledge of the subject matter, coupled with his ability to plan, organize and motivate others, was central to making his multimedia projects successful. In fact, the simulation described in this article was recognized by the IBM Corporation and received equipment support so that it could be updated to run on micro-channel machines. It was shown at IBM's Academic Information System Conference where it was viewed by Falcon Software, Inc., which subsequently asked to publish the program. This project shows that, with knowledge, planning, ingenuity, and flexibility, it is possible to overcome the obstacles and develop successful multimedia courseware in academic settings.

Comments are appreciated; send them to
Ulric Chung, Ulric@uic.edu