Interactive Multimedia Instruction in Video Production Classes

Students who enroll in a video production class at a typical college are required to buy a textbook, sometimes a workbook, and usually several video tapes. Conscientious students reads the textbook. They also use the workbook to reinforce what they have read and may choose to look up some of the other books or articles referred to by the textbook. They go to class and hear a lecture from a qualified professor. The professor may use other means at his or her disposal as well, such as drawing on the chalk board, class discussion, and even a video tape on the subject at hand. Then the students go to lab, where they see the lesson put to use and finally get to put it all to use themselves. Suppose however, that any student could have the textbook, the workbook, extra reference books and articles, lectures from many different professors, drawings, still pictures, video, and even a certain amount of discussion at his or her fingertips daily-all in one compact workstation. No longer is the student a passive learner. Nor must the student work long and hard to assemble extra sources for added understanding. There is a tool available that makes all this possible. This tool goes by many names, including hypermed ia (Marchionini, 1988), interactive video (Baron & Hutchinson, 1984), interactive videodisc (Meyer, 1984), interactive video systems (Seal-Wanner, 1988) and interactive multimedia (Savenye, 1990). The names have changed along with the growth of the system. Because of the vast amount of information available to students through a multitude of media in today’s interactive system, interactive multimedia is probably the most appropriate term. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of interactive multimedia in a video production class. The experiment e v a1 u a t e s inter active multimedia’s effectiveness compared to the typical classroom lecture. Interactive multimedia (IAM) is the non-linear combination of graphics, sound, animation, text, pictures, and video clips that takes advantage of the computer’s ability for random access (Marchionini, 1988; Corcoran, 1989). Interactive multimedia has many features and advantages which make it most appealing to the many people and institutions experimenting with it. Students have access to a large amount of information stored compactly for rapid and easy access and presented in a variety of media. Osborn(1990,p. 370),maintainsthat