Abstract:

Appropriate use of multimedia brings potential education and learning benefits to students. It is widely accepted that people learn better when the full potentials of multimedia are put to correct use, during the design of educational / learning material. In a previous paper by the authors, we presented an initial media selection framework, used for mapping multimedia to educational concepts. In this paper, we present results of experiments carried out using the framework practically for educational design. Specifically, the paper focuses on validating the framework, in essence, assessing the extent to which it improves learning. The validation experiment compared the performance of students that learned from material designed using the framework, with the performance of students that learned from existing learning materials, both sets of material contained similar educational concepts. We also performed reliability tests (assessing whether the framework produces the same media output for the same educational concept) and usability tests (assessing whether users found the framework easy to use). This paper presents and discusses the results of these tests.

Keywords:

Multimedia, media selection, educational material.