Discussion #1: Evaluating Multimedia Learning Objects

Digital media literacy is a process. The framework for this process is: Access, Analyze, Create, Evaluate. In this module, you will begin by accessing and analyzing learning objects created by others. Becoming media literate is just like learning to read and write. There are steps that you must take to learn to read and understand media before learning to create it. The first step is to study media by deconstructing it into its separate parts, analyzing each part, and then reconstructing what was inferred from the process.

Authors use literary devices in poetry, literature, and rhetoric to enhance their messages. Digital multimedia authors use similar literary devices in the form of text, images, audio, video, and animation, all working together to send the intended message. To become truly digitally literate, it is necessary to study media language and learn to “read between the lines.” The deconstruction process forces you to analyze each individual part of the media and discover how each part contributes to the ultimate message. As you analyze the LOs, keep this in mind. Your role for the Discussion is Multimedia Critic.

Digital media is impacting our lives in the educational field as well as in our personal lives. Anyone with a computer, mobile device, Internet access, video camera, and a microphone can create multimedia and share it online. Multimedia use in the classroom was once considered a luxury. Now that digital tools for multimedia creation have become somewhat affordable for the masses, developing multimedia for the classroom is becoming the expectation. This massification of digital media has created an overabundance of media at work and at home. As educators, the demand to use digital media in the classroom and in academic communications is taking precedence over traditional forms of communication. It is imperative that educators learn to manage the access, analysis, creation, and evaluation of media for the purpose of learning.

As a result of massification and open courseware, the era of visual-based teaching and learning is on the rise. Educators are experimenting with digital multimedia for teaching and learning (instructional multimedia). Some of it is effective, and some of it is not.

In this module, you will explore how multimedia learning objects (LOs) are being used to teach processes and ideas. You will share LOs that you find on the web with your classmates and discuss the merits and faults of existing instructional multimedia.

Learning Objectives

Learners will:

• Evaluate learning objects using multimedia design principles

To prepare:

Read Clark and Mayer, Chapter 2; Vaughn, Chapter 1; and the Mayer and Moreno and McGreal articles. Perform a web search for multimedia LOs. Find three LOs that interest you and save the URL for each of them. http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Sep_04/article02.htm

Resourse: http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Sep_04/article02.htm

http://www.teachertube.com/

http://learner.org/

Vaughan, T. (2014). Multimedia: Making it work (9th ed.). New York, NY: Osborne/McGraw-Hill.

Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43–52.

Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.

• Chapter 1, “What Is Multimedia?” (pp. 1–17)