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Defining Multimeda

Multimedia refers to images (such as drawings, photos, and illustrations), audio clips (such as short audio lectures), and video clips (such as narrated PowerPoint lectures or simple animations that demonstrate a process).  Multimedia can be made interactive, meaning it responds to students’ clicking and typing.  Examples of interactive multimedia activities range from hotspots on images to videos that contain embedded questions to full-blown educational video games.

Figure 1. Using hotspots, you present an image to students. Students then interact with the image by mousing over it (to get information about different parts of the image) or by clicking specific parts of the image (to answer questions, as in this example).

Overall, multimedia is time-intensive to produce and sometimes time-intensive just to source, and therefore for practical considerations must be incorporated into an online course thoughtfully and sparingly.

How Much—and What Kind—of Multimedia Makes Sense for Your Course?

To answer this question, you’ll need to consider three things:

1. What visuals do you typically present when you teach the face-to-face version of this course? Do you draw on the whiteboard?  Perform demonstrations?  Lecture using PowerPoint slides or photo slideshows?  Require students to give presentations to the class?
2. Of these, which pieces of these visuals absolutely must be presented visually?   Incorporating visuals into an online course is extremely time intensive, and therefore needs to be considered judiciously.  Ask yourself how much of the visual material you present in a face-to-face course has to be presented visually to online students.  For example, if 40 minutes of your face-to-face lecture faithfully covers the text and 10 minutes consists of additional, unique, highly visual demonstrations that amplify and support the text, only the latter 10 minutes would be a good candidate for a video. (There are other, less time-intensive ways to incorporate the first 40 minutes.)

Figure 2. If a concept can be conveyed via text, use text! The most effective choices for multimedia are those concepts that require highly visual materials to explain.

3. How much time can you spend to create (or source) the absolutely necessary visuals?
   1. Depending on the textbook you’ve chosen for your course,you may be able to incorporate pre-made images, videos, and even interactive activities created by your textbook publisher. This is the quickest approach, and may make sense if your course is tied tightly to a specific text. A quick email to your textbook publisher will let you know your options.
   2. Depending on the subject and grade level you teach, you may be able to source images, videos, and multimedia activities through the Boise State Library, or through free online multimedia repositories. This will be easier if you teach a common, highly visual subject like history (for which there are abundant online resources). Contact your Instructional Design Consultant for a list of repositories. Maintaining copyright on images, videos and other resources is another important consideration to address.
   3. If you need to create your own videos or animations, you’ll need to budget somewhere around 10 hours for every 1 hour of video time created—and possibly more if this is your first experience creating video.  (Why so much time? Because while it’s easy to walk into a classroom and demonstrate, lecture, and draw on the whiteboard or overheads in real time, it’s not nearly as easy to produce video.  The steps involved in selecting, scripting, editing, close captioning, and uploading video are much more involved and time-intensive.) The good news is that you don’t need to create videos to match your F2F lectures hour for hour; in fact, doing so would be very ineffective. Online, less is more.
   4. If you’re okay with using synchronous meetings, you can use a tool like Google Meet (formerly Google Hangouts) or Zoom to present visual materials in real-time (or have students do so).  Synchronous meetings have their drawbacks: the technology isn’t perfect, there’s a learning curve, and synchronous meetings tie online students to a specific time and place, which may break student expectations.  (Many online students take online courses precisely because their schedules prohibit synchronous meetings, so you need to consider this option thoughtfully.) Still, depending on your specific course requirements, synchronous meetings may be worth pursuing.

Figure 3. Although synchronous meetings such as Google Meet are an option for presenting visual information to (and among) students, they should be used judiciously.

Ways to Use Video Effectively

Figure 4. Incorporating short video segments, such as this navigation video, can boost student engagement and enhance student learning.

Video clips can be extremely valuable—both for conveying visual information economically and for helping online students feel connected to you, the instructor.  Typically, you’ll want to add video to your course during the development phase, but adding it during the semester as you teach can be useful, too.

Below are the most common uses of video in an online course:

• Create a course navigation video (see Figure 4 above) that walks new students through your online course and shows them what to expect, what to click to submit an assignment, etc.  Best created at the end of course development.
• Create a personal introduction video that lets your students see you—and your enthusiasm for your subject—just as they would in a classroom. Best created during course development.
• Provide a video introduction to the class overall
• Introduce one or more modules (best created during course development).
• Reimagine your lectures and deliver them as a series of short (10 to 15 minutes or so), concise video clips (best created during course development).
• Provide short videos of yourself giving the assignment or test feedback to individual students or groups (can be created while you’re teaching, for personalized feedback, or during development, to create a visual combination rubric-plus-example).
• Provide a short video “post-mortem” after a major assignment or test to address commonly misunderstood concepts or other concerns (must be created during the semester, as the value of this approach is tailoring your remarks to your current crop of students). You might choose to show an essay and walk students through how you’d grade it, marking it up as you go, for example.

Creating and posting a video to your online course can be time-consuming, so again, especially if this is your first pass at developing an online course, you’ll likely want to reserve video for situations where the time “bucks” you’ll be spending are worth the “bang”:

• for familiarizing your students with your course layout and showing them how to get around in your course (you’ll create a short navigation video),
• for clarifying concepts students traditionally find difficult to grasp by reading the textbook (you’ll carefully select portions of your lectures to present via video), and
• for communicating briefly with the class as a whole at the beginning of each module (you’ll create 1- or 2-minute module introductions).

After your course has been developed and you’ve begun teaching it, you may want to incorporate additional video clips to reassure or correct students when you sense (by monitoring discussion boards, fielding emails, or grading assignments, for example) that much of the class has misunderstood a particular concept.

Figure 5. You don’t have to create all the video for your course from scratch. Your publisher (and, often, your departmental colleagues) may be able to point you to high-quality online multimedia mini-lectures, explanations, and demonstrations hosted on YouTube or elsewhere.

The Boise State University Office of Information Technology has created a valuable set of Instructional Video Guidelines that include examples of high-quality instructional videos.  Feel free to browse the other topics in the menu on the left side of their page to learn more about creating specific types of instructional video.  On a final note, did you know that Camtasia Studio is available free of charge for faculty?  Click on the software downloads link on the Instructional Video Guidelines page to access this great tool.

Next Steps: Planning and Creating Multimedia

Now that you have a feel for what types of multimedia you can create (or source) and have had a chance to think about how multimedia might be used effectively in your course, you’re ready to jot down your thoughts.  In the next activity, referring to your course design map, you’ll note which activities and assessments you’d like to add multimedia to; then you’ll briefly describe what you want the multimedia to look like, how long you’d like it to be, what you intend students to get out of it, and so on.

After you’ve got a first stab at an overall multimedia plan, you’ll know the details that will help guide your choice of multimedia development tool.  (We’ll be discussing specific tools, along with how-tos, in an upcoming module.)