CHARACTERISTICS OF INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA TEXTBOOKS: CASE STUDIES OF CROATIAN TEXTBOOKS

A textbook is a basic literature in primary and secondary schools on which rely the performance of the teaching process. Textbook is one of the primary sources for learning, especially when students work alone during the class or at home. One of the key characteristics of school textbooks is that they have verified information which is formatted according to students’ needs and pedagogical standards. Advancements in information and communication technologies has enabled creation and integration of multimedia (text, audio, video, animation) into the textbooks, in order to enrich teaching and learning process, to motivate students and to foster active and meaningful learning. By interactive multimedia textbook, we assume a textbook in digital format that includes various media and interactive tools that support knowledge acquisition and evaluation. Design and creation of such textbooks should be guided by the principles of graphic design taking into account enabling technologies and learning environment, but also guided by didactic and pedagogic principles in order to direct students’ attention towards important information, so that learners can easily organize and integrate new information with previous knowledge.

This paper discusses the design of interactive multimedia textbooks and presents the results of a comparative analysis of the textbooks of two school subjects used in secondary schools and developed by two Croatian book publishers. First, we presented literature overview of the main characteristics of interactive multimedia textbooks. Second, we identified the principles of multimedia learning for various learning content areas in order to explore which media and interaction elements are relevant for particular field of study. Further, we proposed sets of criteria to analyse interactive multimedia textbooks and presented the analysis results of such textbooks in mathematics and second language acquisition. By analyzing the characteristics of interactive multimedia textbooks for various school subjects, it is evident that the design of such textbooks for a particular field of study requires a specific approach, integration of design principles that are aligned to specifics of that field and conformation to curricular changes.