Characteristics of an Equitable Instructional Methodology for Courses in Interactive Media

Abstract

This paper focuses on an action research that was conducted to address difficulties with the development of multimedia applications. These difficulties were associated with the programming (scripting) parts of the development environment that were required to create the interactive elements within them. Initially, a learning environment based on adaptive hypermedia was constructed to provide for students with different backgrounds. Unfortunately a large amount of the content that was developed became redundant when the development software changed. Anecdotally, I was aware of these difficulties, but an analysis of questionnaire data that had been collected at the end of each course offerings, revealed a Difficulty factor that could be reduced to a value. When we looked at this figure for arts and then computing students, we found that arts students found these elements significantly more difficult than the computing. This in itself was expected but their respective values provided a metric to use in future evaluations. What followed was a longitudinal study that involved an action research to resolve the difference in this metric; the result hopefully being that students managed the development environment irrespective of their background. This involved presenting the framework for the development in a more abstract way so that global commands could be planned by the group and then used within individually created sections. A project based instructional methodology suited this course and authentic projects were used. Students were expected to engage in all aspects of the project, including the interactive elements. We avoided the situation where the arts group member became responsible for the graphic design alone. Peer review and peer assessment were embedded within the course to ensure that students maintained their engagement and got meaningful feedback that could be included in their projects. The instructional methods used resulted in there being an emphasis on all the parts of the project, and a subsequent valuing of all the components required for the project’s completion.