As teachers most of us are interested in how we can get students to come away from our courses with the things we really want them to learn. Yet the emphasis in so many courses is on gathering information that will be needed to achieve a higher score on the exit testing. I’ve watched students in class spend so much time trying to write down everything the instructor says that they miss the opportunity to absorb the overall meaning of the discussion/lecture.
Multimedia presentation is one area where e-learning can offer a significant advantage over the traditional classroom delivery structure. There is no question that you can produce a great live multimedia presentation with lecture and accompanying visual aids- especially if you are a good live presenter. However, one of the great challenges is that once the lecture is over, the students don’t have it to go back to for further study. That’s why so many of them are so frantic to write down everything that is said during the presentation. Many students tape record lectures and this is a great advantage for audio playback, but that misses the important visual aids that are an important part of explaining important concepts.
A well-constructed (and this is crucial) e-learning presentation that includes audio and visuals can be an excellent learning tool because the student can go back to the same original presentation over and over until the concepts have really been absorbed. Research has shown a greater degree of retention and knowledge transfer with high quality multimedia presentations, so I think this learning strategy holds great promise. Our big challenge now is to get people to learn what a high quality multimedia presentation entails and how to produce one.
