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Electronic learning --
designing RLOs I
found that designing reusable learning objects presented a number of
interesting technical and design problems. I summarise some of the
issues I
faced below. Technical problems After
an e-mail correspondence with a colleague, I acquired free
software and experimented with it.
Legal problems I
am still not sure about the extent to which it is permissible to grab
images and text from the Web and from broadcast and use those in mixing
an
educational package. A visiting lawyer explained to the members of the
course
which I am attending on creative entrepreneurship that educational
packages are
more or less exempt from copyright restrictions, given an attempt to
demonstrate goodwill by offering to get permission and so on. However,
the
college might have additional contracts and agreements with publishers
and its
own understanding of copyright. Using my RLOs on College kit might
offer
additional problems. Design problems If
the package is to contain mixtures of video, still images, animated
images, audio of various kinds and text, the design problems that
emerge are
familiar ones. Which of these media turns out to be the best to convey
which
educational intentions? There
is a considerable backlog of educational technology research on
these matters. I was fairly immersed in it once, but have lost touch
with the
more recent contributions. The discussions turned on matters such as
whether
educational video or audio were effective as educational media. A
number of
analysts, including Umberto Eco, worried that the audience would treat
audio
and video in the way in which they were accustomed -- as entertainment.
There
is also the difficult matter of which conventions are to be used to
guide the
production of video and audio. From what I can see so far, video and
audio
elements seem to correspond to some familiar popular genres, especially
documentary realism. There is much debate about the effectiveness of
this
genre, both in educational and media theory -- very basically, there
are grave
doubts about whether documentary realism can develop educational or
political
critique. To be specific, a famous analysis of an Open University
television
programme on unemployment argued that the academic intentions (to
critique the
conventional views that unemployment is a result of personal
inadequacy) was
subverted by the decision to shoot a conventional documentary about
unemployment, which focused precisely on unemployed individuals who
told their
stories. It seemed impossible to illustrate a critical concept such as
'structural unemployment' using the standard production values of
conventional
television. My
view at the time was that therefore we should experiment with
something different for educational video, something that challenged
conventions. An obvious source of ideas was the filmic avant-garde,
especially
the cinema of Godard. There is an evaluation of an experimental OU TV
programme
which did set out to break many of the conventions of television
(although not
quite in an avant garde manner). OU students hated it, illustrating the
tension
between radical design intentions and conservative viewer reactions.
Since that
experiment, however, unconventional video has become rather more
widespread,
especially in forms such as arthouse or music video, popular websites
to host
amateur video, and maybe even in mainstream films. Quite
what the effects of this might be on the audience remain entirely
unknown, but it is tempting to provide a video accompaniment to
'educational'
text which does something more than literally illustrate what can be
read
anyway (the classic example being a video with sound of a lecturer
giving a
lecture, while the text of the lecture scrolls in a separate window). There
might be something in the view that audio and video works best on
the emotions or the unconscious anyway. There is some background here,
of
course, in media studies and its analyses of surrealism or music.
Educational
video needs to become aware of this material, and move away from an
excessive
interest in the cognitive. There
is along tradition of interest in ‘visual’ learners too, and this
has been given recent attention in the popular NLP movement. From what
I
recall, most of the benefits are claimed for still images in fact.
However,
much of this work has recently been criticized as highly unreliable and
speculative (in a recent Government report on learning styles).
Nevertheless it
featured prominently in the recent claims to expertise made by our
in-house
video production company in designing materials for our VLE – the claim
seems
to interest managers. Costs Overall,
there is a serious problem with the cost effectiveness of both
audio and visual elements. Given their relative educational
ineffectiveness,
and the considerable costs of production if it is decided to match
conventional
production values, it seems there is some mileage in thinking of
deliberately
amateur productions. It might be possible to make these relatively
challenging
as well in terms of conventions -- to make them look like Godard,
Jarman, ‘realist’,
‘gonzo’ or Danish dogme
pieces, designed with the same intent of 'shocking'
the audience out of its
conventional passivity and complacency (without making them too angry
and
defensive). There
is also the formidable problem of what happens when you combine
these different media. My own view on the latter is that this is not
really a
design problem at all if users are allowed to control the individual
elements
of the package altogether. One thing I like about Producer is that it
permits
users to switch on or off the video and audio elements, adjust the
volume,
advance and wind back the video and so on. My intention would be to
evaluate
how users actually do control the packages, and perhaps offer some
hints in the
instructional material so that they can maximise the benefit at the
reception
end. Outcomes The RLOs I have produced so far are based around
conventional text and PowerPoint materials. I still cannot see many
reasons for
making video or audio the central educational medium. I am aware that
an OU
study showed that audio tapes were probably the most cost-effective
medium, and
this may still be the case –but tapes are not multimedia. I am using amateur video (perhaps too amateur). I think
these media should not offer documentary
realism but some other kind of experience – to try to calm people,
offer gentle
parody (of wildlife films, security video), be playful (nice friendly
interviews), offer ‘raw’ data (of a risky leisure activity). I would like to incorporate commercially-produced
material
if this is legal and ethical – slightly challenging material such as
Swankmajer, Aardman Animations, bits of experimental video I have
accumulated
over the years, avant-garde film, music video, music tracks, vox pops
(eg
‘thinking aloud’ pieces). Whether the costs of using such material
outweigh the
benefits will be an important issue. The politics of taste may prove
the
biggest obstacle. Evaluation I think evaluation is more important than design for
educational materials: artistic media has different aesthetics, but
educators
want to teach something to actual punters. Evaluation offers a number
of
challenges as above, but it is essential to see how students use these
RLOs in
practice, and to ask questions such as: Have there been any changes in learning? Are the multimedia elements beneficial or distracting? Which element seems more useful and which more
interesting? Are motivations, emotions and feelings affected as well
as
cognition? How do RLOs compare with other electronic forms? Are there any technical difficulties? What would be the best way to improve or change the
material? |