Lesson 3 - Implementing Online Learning

7.1. Key Media Characteristics

It will help clarify the possible benefits or weaknesses for the education of each medium if we understand the characteristics or affordances of each medium. To do this we need to identify where media have common or different features.

There is a wide range of media characteristics or affordances that we could look at, but I will focus on three that are particularly important for education:

• Whether media are broadcast (one-way) or communicative (two way)
• Whether media are synchronous or asynchronous, including live (transient) or recorded (permanent)
• Whether media are single or rich

We shall see that these characteristics are more dimensional than discrete states, and different media will fit at different points on these dimensions, but the exact point on the continuum will depend to some extent on the way they are designed or used. In this section, I will focus on the broadcast/communicative dimension. The other two characteristics will be discussed in subsequent sections.