How have my concepts of multimedia changed?

It wasn’t long ago that the primary controversy surrounding multimedia instruction revolved around whether the use of multimedia improved instruction or resulted in improved learning outcomes for students. The “no significant difference” argument, while still around, was popular among academics and technicians of instructional design.

At the same time, anecdotal evidence, as well as common sense, told many designers of instruction that the use of multimedia was an improvement over traditional, primarily behaviorist, pedagogical approaches. Ultimately, for me, I pragmatically took the path of moderation and determined that any well-designed instructional experience will be positive whether it is delivered face-to-face by an instructor or whether it is delivered asynchronously using interactive multimedia instruction.

What did make sense to me, though, was that multimedia, well-designed multimedia, did provide some procedural efficiencies and allowed for reduced cost of delivery based on efficiencies of scale and reduced instructor contact time with students. If a traditional course could be taught by one instructor with a maximum of, say, 18 students (completely arbitrary number, by the way), then a self-paced asynchronous web-based interactive multimedia course could potentially be delivered to a larger number of students, multiple times, without incurring the cost of an instructor, seat space, heating and air conditioning, electricity, or even travel expenses. That’s all assuming the course is well-designed and evaluation shows that the IMM instruction achieves the same instructional goals as the F2F instruction.

In the nearly 20 years since I began my career in instructional design, I’ve been aware of continuing research into the design and development of interactive instructional technologies. What I’ve recently begun to recognize is that much of the research isn’t so much about proving the instructional effectiveness of IMM instruction. In fact, it seems as if people have actually gotten past the “no significant difference” argument and have focused research on new and better ways to design multimedia for instruction. Theories of design as well as improvement in understanding how learning is achieved have contributed to the overall depth of the field.

Recently I’ve also understood how our understanding of good and bad practices contribute to the effectiveness of instruction in general. One of this week’s articles is a good example. In Ögren, Nyström, & Jarodzka, 2017, the researchers found in a study of print and graphic media that “graphs were not found to be beneficial per se in the experiment. Only when they were carefully framed and integrated with the problem statement they had a beneficial effect on performance” (p. 283). They found that poorly integrated graphics tended to distract attention and cognitive processes from the processing of the instructional message.

I’m looking forward to exploring more concepts and theories about the design and development of effective multimedia instruction.

Ögren, M., Nyström, M., & Jarodzka, H. (2017). There’s more to the multimedia effect than meets the eye: Is seeing pictures believing? Instructional Science, 45(2), 263–287. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9397-6