Autumn, 2005
Thursday 4:30-6:48
Hopkins 354
Instructor: Rick Voithofer, Ph.D.
voithofer.2@osu.edu

Educational multimedia, sometimes called elearning, is the integration of text, sound, video, graphics, and/or animation into a cohesive educational experience. The potential to create compelling, enlivening educational experiences with multimedia is as great as the possibility to create dull, confusing and superficial instruction. In this course you will actively participate in the design and production of educational multimedia. You will be engaged in the design process throughout the quarter by consistently reflecting on your design decisions in an iterative process.  Every detail is important in creating educational multimedia including screen layout and interface, media selection, learner control, learner feedback, navigation structure, pacing, content and assessment.

For this class you will work alone or in small groups to create a unit of multimedia instruction. A unit is a complete educational segment in which a subject/idea/concept/problem is introduced, the learner is lead through the exploration of the content, the learner is somehow assessed, and there is a conclusion to the lesson. The length and complexity of this unit will vary according to your content, learners, media choice, layout, and assessment. Across multiple  projects you will work towards the design, production, and evaluation of this unit. If you are working in a group, you will create one section of this unit. This section could be a content delivery section, a practice section, or an assessment section, to name a few.

 We will use Macromedia Flash MX 2004 as our authoring software. Flash MX 2004 is a dual platform  (Mac/PC) authoring and animation tool that creates programs that can be played back using any web browser with the appropriate plug-in or without a browser using a free player.  Because this is a design course you are not expected to master Flash or any of the other software tools that we will be using. Knowing the basics of these tools will, however, give you a better sense of the production process and will help you to become a better educational multimedia designer.