Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

13.2. Teaching as a Weak Discriminator in Media Selection

Previous lessons exclusively focus on the best uses of each medium. This lesson goes on to look at the effective design of multimedia. Most teachers and instructors would put the effectiveness of a medium for teaching and learning as the first criterion for media selection. If the technology is not educationally effective, why would you use it? Why do we need the other parts of the SECTIONS model?

However, if a student cannot access or use technology, there will be no learning from that technology, no matter how useful the educational affordances or how well the medium is designed. Furthermore, motivated teachers will overcome educational weaknesses or shortcomings in a particular technology, or conversely, teachers inexperienced in using media will often under-exploit the potential of a medium (such as using video for talking heads).

Similarly, students will respond differently to different technologies due to preferred learning styles or differences in motivation. Students who work hard can overcome poor use of learning technologies. It is not surprising then that with so many variables involved, teaching and learning is a relatively weak discriminator for selecting and using technologies. Access (and ease of use) are stronger discriminators than teaching effectiveness in selecting media. This explains why teaching that does not really exploit the educational affordances of a medium can often still get good results. Nevertheless, ideally one should try to make the best use of the pedagogical features of a medium because when it is then combined with the other SECTIONS criteria, the teaching is likely to be more effective.