A Framework for Mapping Multimedia to Educational Concepts

Multimedia provides exciting opportunities in education as it allows educational materials to be delivered in ways that can both simplify and enhance learning experience. Increasingly, educational material developers are using multimedia to deliver education but tend to use multimedia in ways that are more often based on intuition and personal experience, which can lead to the development of ineffective learning materials. It is known that some media types are better than others at conveying information. For example, when trying to portray a physical object, a picture would do a better job than text. This is a good illustration of the popular saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but when is a word worth a thousand pictures, or when is an animation worth a thousand diagrams? The number of available media types, possible combinations and modes of delivery present a problem in the design of educational material. What media type(s) do we use for a given educational content to improve learning? This is important because using inappropriate media types can lead to the development of ineffective educational materials. The research aims to solve this problem. Initially, it presents the results of a study which shows that intuition and personal experience are mostly relied on, when developing educational materials. It then discusses the design of a media selection framework (the main contribution of this research) and a supporting web application. Next, it presents the results of evaluative experiments aimed at assessing whether learning was improved when the media selection framework was used. Modifications were made to the framework following the initial evaluation and the framework was re-evaluated. Statistically significant improvements in learning were observed when the framework was used. Finally, two case studies of multimedia development were presented to demonstrate the use of the framework.