Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

1. Watch this Video on Choosing Media

2. Pedagogical Differences between Media

2.1. Identifying the Pedagogical Differences between Media

In the last lesson, I identified three core dimensions of media and technology along which any technology can be placed. I will discuss a method for deciding which media to use when teaching. In this lesson, I will focus primarily on the pedagogical differences between media. In the following lesson, I will provide a model or set of criteria to use when making decisions about media and technology for teaching.

2.2. First Steps

Embedded within any decision about the use of technology in education and training will be assumptions about the learning process. We have already seen earlier in this book how different epistemological positions and theories of learning affect the design of teaching, and these influences will also determine a teacher’s or an instructor’s choice of appropriate media. Thus, the first step is to decide what and how you want to teach.

This has been covered in-depth, but in summary, there are five critical questions that need to be asked about teaching and learning in order to select and use appropriate media/technologies:

• What is my underlying epistemological position about knowledge and teaching?
• What are the desired learning outcomes from the teaching?
• What teaching methods will be employed to facilitate the learning outcomes?
• What are the unique educational characteristics of each medium/technology, and how well do these match the learning and teaching requirements?
• What resources are available?

This lesson focuses on the fourth of these questions, but they are best not asked sequentially but in a cyclical or iterative manner, as media affordances may suggest alternative teaching methods or even the possibility of learning outcomes that had not been initially considered. When the unique pedagogical characteristics of different media are considered, this may lead to some changes in what content will be covered and what skills will be developed. Therefore, at this stage, decisions on content, and learning outcomes should still be tentative.

2.3. Identifying the Unique Educational Characteristics of a Medium

Different media have different potential or ‘affordances’ for different types of learning. One of the arts of teaching is often finding the best match between media and desired learning outcomes. Before exploring this relationship, first, a summary of the substantial amount of excellent past research on this topic (see, for instance, Trenaman, 1967; Olson and Bruner, 1974; Schramm, 1977; Salomon, 1979, 1981; Clark, 1983; Bates, 1984; Koumi, 2006; Berk, 2009; Mayer, 2009).

This research has indicated that there are three core elements that need to be considered when deciding what media to use:

• Content
• Content structure
• Skills

Olson and Bruner (1974) claim that learning involves two distinct aspects: acquiring knowledge of facts, principles, ideas, concepts, events, relationships, rules and laws; and using or working on that knowledge to develop skills. Again, this is not necessarily a sequential process. Identifying skills then working back to identify the concepts and principles needed to underpin the skills maybe another valid way of working. In reality, learning content and skills development will often be integrated in any learning process. Nevertheless, when deciding on media use, it is useful to make a distinction between content and skills.

Media differ in the extent to which they can represent different kinds of content because they vary in the symbol systems (text, sound, still pictures, moving images, etc.) that they use to encode information (Salomon, 1979). We saw in the previous lesson that different media are capable of combining different symbol systems. Differences between media in the way they combine symbol systems influence the way in which different media represent content. Thus there is a difference between a direct experience, a written description, a televised recording, and a computer simulation of the same scientific experiment. Different symbol systems are being used, conveying different kinds of information about the same experiment. For instance, our concept of heat can be derived from touch, mathematical symbols (800 celsius), words (random movement of particles), animation, or observance of experiments. Our ‘knowledge’ of heat is as a result not static, but developmental. A large part of learning requires the mental integration of content acquired through different media and symbol systems. For this reason, a deeper understanding of a concept or an idea is often the result of the integration of content derived from a variety of media sources (Mayer, 2009).

Media also differ in their ability to handle concrete or abstract knowledge. Abstract knowledge is handled primarily through language. While all media can handle language, either in written or spoken form, media vary in their ability to represent concrete knowledge. For instance, television can show concrete examples of abstract concepts, the video showing the concrete ‘event’, and the soundtrack analyzing the event in abstract terms. Well-designed media can help learners move from the concrete to the abstract and back again, once more leading to deeper understanding.

Media also differ in the way they structure content. Books, the telephone, radio, podcasts, and face-to-face teaching all tend to present content linearly or sequentially. While these media can represent parallel activities (for example, in print, different lessons may deal with events that occur simultaneously but from different perspectives) such activities still have to be presented sequentially. Computers and television are more able to present or simulate the inter-relationship of multiple variables simultaneously occurring. Virtual reality is an exceptionally powerful example of this. Computers can also handle branching or alternative routes through information, but usually within closely defined limits.

Subject matter varies a great deal in the way in which information needs to be structured. Subject areas (for example, natural sciences, history) structure content in particular ways determined by the internal logic of the subject discipline. This structure may be very tight or logical, requiring particular sequences or relationships between different concepts, or very open or loose, requiring learners to deal with highly complex material in an open-ended or intuitive way.

If media then vary both in the way they present information symbolically and in the way they handle the structures required within different subject areas, media that best match the required mode of presentation and the dominant structure of the subject matter need to be selected. Consequently, different subject areas will require a different balance of media. This means that subject expert should be deeply involved in decisions about the choice and use of media, to ensure that the chosen media appropriately match the presentational and structural requirements of the subject matter.

Media also differ in the extent to which they can help develop different skills. Skills can range from intellectual to psychomotor to affective (emotions, feelings). Koumi (2015) has used Krathwohl’s (2002) revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives (1956) to assign affordances of text and video to learn objectives using Krathwold’s classification of learning objectives.

Comprehension is likely to be the minimal level of intellectual learning outcome for most education courses. Some researchers (for example, Marton and Säljö, 1976) make a distinction between surface and deep comprehension. At the highest level of skills comes the application of what one has comprehended to new situations. Here it becomes necessary to develop skills of analysis, evaluation, and problem-solving.

Thus a first step is to identify learning objectives or outcomes, in terms of both content and skills, while being aware that the use of some media may result in new possibilities in terms of learning outcomes.

2.4. Pedagogical Affordances - or Unique Media Characteristics

‘Affordances’ is a term originally developed by the psychologist James Gibson (1977) to describe the perceived possibilities of an object in relation to its environment (for example, a doorknob suggests to a user that it should be turned or pulled, while a flat plate on a door suggests that it should be pushed.). The term has been appropriated by a number of fields, including instructional design and human-machine interaction.

Thus the pedagogical affordances of a medium relate to the possibilities of using that medium for specific teaching purposes. It should be noted that an affordance depends on the subjective interpretation of the user (in this case a teacher or instructor), and it is often possible to use a medium in ways that are not unique to that medium. For instance, video can be used for recording and delivering a lecture. In that sense, there is a similarity in at least one affordance for a lecture and a video. Also, students may choose not to use a medium in the way intended by the instructor. For instance, Bates and Gallagher (1977) found that some social science students objected to documentary-style television programs requiring the application of knowledge or analysis rather than the presentation of concepts.

Others (such as myself) have used the term ‘unique characteristics’ of a medium rather than affordances, since ‘unique characteristics’ suggest that there are particular uses of a medium that are less easily replicated by other media, and hence act as a better discriminator in selecting and using media. For instance, using video to demonstrate in slow motion a mechanical process is much more difficult (but not impossible) to replicate in other media. In what follows, my focus is more on unique or particular rather than general affordances of each medium, although the subjective and flexible nature of media interpretation makes it difficult to come to any hard and fast conclusions.

I will now attempt in the next sections to identify some of the unique pedagogical characteristics of the following media:

• Text
• Audio
• Video
• Computing
• Social media
• emerging technologies, in particular, virtual/augmented reality, serious games and artificial intelligence.

2.5. Purpose of the Exercise

Before starting on the analysis of different media, it is important to understand my goals in this lesson. I am NOT trying to provide a definitive list of the unique pedagogical characteristics of each medium. Because context is so important and because the science is not strong enough to identify unequivocally such characteristics, I am suggesting in the following sections a way of thinking about the pedagogical affordances of different media. To do this, I will identify what I think are the most important pedagogical characteristics of each medium.

However, individual readers may well come to different conclusions, depending particularly on the subject area in which they are working. The important point is for teachers and instructors to think about what each medium could contribute educationally within their subject area, and that requires a strong understanding of both the needs of their students and the nature of their subject area, as well as the key pedagogical features of each medium.

3. Text

3.1. The Unique Pedagogical Features of Text

Ever since the invention of the Gutenberg press, print has been dominant teaching technology, arguably at least as influential as the spoken word of the teacher. Even today, textbooks, mainly in printed format, but increasingly also in digital format, still play a major role in formal education, training, and distance education. Many fully online courses still make extensive use of text-based learning management systems and online asynchronous discussion forums.

Why is this? What makes text such a powerful teaching medium, and will it remain so, given the latest developments in information technology?

Text can come in many formats, including printed textbooks, text messages, novels, magazines, newspapers, scribbled notes, journal articles, essays, novels, online asynchronous discussions and so on.

The key symbol systems in text are written language (including mathematical symbols) and still graphics, which would include diagrams, tables, and copies of images such as photographs or paintings. Colour is an important attribute for some subject areas, such as chemistry, geography and geology, and art history.

Some of the unique presentational characteristics of text are as follows:

• Text is particularly good at handling abstraction and generalization, mainly through written language.
• Text enables the linear sequencing of information in a structured format.
• Text can present and separate empirical evidence or data from the abstractions, conclusions or generalizations derived from the empirical evidence.
• Text’s linear structure enables the development of a coherent, sequential argument or discussion.
• At the same time text can relate evidence to argument and vice versa.
• Text’s recorded and permanent nature enables independent analysis and critique of its content.
• Still graphics such as graphs or diagrams enable knowledge to be presented differently from written language, either providing concrete examples of abstractions or offering a different way of representing the same knowledge.

There is some overlap of each of these features with other media, but no other medium combines all these characteristics, or is as powerful as text with respect to these characteristics.

Earlier I argued that academic knowledge is a specific form of knowledge that has characteristics that differentiate it from other kinds of knowledge and particularly from knowledge or beliefs based solely on direct personal experience. Academic knowledge is a second-order form of knowledge that seeks abstractions and generalizations based on reasoning and evidence.

Fundamental components of or criteria for academic knowledge are:

• Codification: knowledge can be consistently represented in some form (words, symbols, video).
• Transparency: the source of knowledge can be traced and verified.
• Reproduction: knowledge can be reproduced or have multiple copies.
• communicability: knowledge must be in a form such that it can be communicated and challenged by others.

Skills Development

Because of the text’s ability to handle abstractions, and evidence-based argument, and its suitability for independent analysis and critique, the text is particularly useful for developing the higher learning outcomes required at an academic level, such as analysis, critical thinking, and evaluation.

It is less useful for showing processes or developing manual skills, for instance.

3.2. The Book and Knowledge

Although text can come in many formats, I want to focus particularly on the role of the book, because of its centrality in academic learning. The book has proved to be a remarkably powerful medium for the development and transmission of academic knowledge, since it meets all four of the components required for presenting academic knowledge, but to what extent can new media such as blogs, wikis, multimedia and social media replace the book in academic knowledge?

New media can in fact handle just as well some of these criteria, and provide indeed added value, such as the speed of reproduction and ubiquity, but the book still has some unique qualities. A key advantage of a book is that it allows for the development of a sustained, coherent, and comprehensive argument with evidence to support the argument. Blogs can do this only to a limited extent (otherwise they cease to be blogs and become articles or a digital book).

Quantity is important sometimes and books allow for the collection of a great deal of evidence and supporting argument, and allow for a wider exploration of an issue or theme, within a relatively condensed and portable format. A consistent and well supported argument, with evidence, alternative explanations or even counter positions, requires the extra ‘space’ of a book. Above all, books can provide coherence or a sustained, particular position or approach to a problem or issue, a necessary balance to the chaos and confusion of the many new forms of digital media that constantly compete for our attention, but in much smaller ‘chunks’ that are overall more difficult to integrate and digest.

Another important academic feature of the text is that it can be carefully scrutinized, analyzed and constantly checked, partly because it is largely linear, and also permanent once published, enabling more rigorous challenge or testing in terms of evidence, rationality, and consistency. Multimedia in recorded format can come close to meeting these criteria, but the text can also provide more convenience and in media terms, more simplicity. For instance, I repeatedly find analyzing video, which incorporates many variables and symbol systems, more complex than analyzing a linear text, even if both contain equally rigorous (or equally sloppy) arguments.

Does the form or technological representation of a book matter any more? Is a book still a book if downloaded and read on an iPad or Kindle, rather than as printed text?

For the purposes of knowledge acquisition, it probably isn’t any different. Indeed, for study purposes, a digital version is probably more convenient because carrying an iPad around with maybe hundreds of books downloaded on it is certainly preferable to carrying around the printed versions of the same books. There are still complaints by students about the difficulties of annotating e-books, but this will almost certainly become a standard feature available in the future.

If the whole book is downloaded, then the function of a book doesn’t change much just because it is available digitally. However, there are some subtle changes. Some would argue that scanning is still easier with a printed version. Have you ever had the difficulty of finding a particular quotation in a digital book compared with the printed version? Sure, you can use the search facility, but that means knowing exactly the correct words or the name of the person being quoted. With a printed book, I can often find a quotation just by flicking the pages, because I am using context and rapid eye scanning to locate the source, even when I don’t know exactly what I am looking for. On the other hand, searching when you do know what you are looking for (e.g. a reference by a particular author) is much easier digitally.

When books are digitally available, users can download only the selected lessons that are of interest to them. This is valuable if you know just what you want, but there are also dangers. For instance in my book on the strategic management of technology (Bates and Sangrà, 2011), the last lesson summarizes the rest of the book. If the book had been digital, the temptation then would be to just download the final lesson. You’d have all the important messages in the book, right? Well, no. What you would be missing is the evidence for the conclusions. Now the book on strategic management is based on case studies, so it would be really important to check back with how the case studies were interpreted to get to the conclusions, as this will affect the confidence you would have as a reader in the conclusions that were drawn. If just the digital version of only the last lesson is downloaded, you also lose the context of the whole book. Having the whole book gives readers more freedom to interpret and add their own conclusions than just having a summary lesson.

In conclusion, then, there are advantages and disadvantages of digitizing a book, but the essence of a book is not greatly changed when it becomes digital rather than printed. I have also written about the advantages of publishing an online academic textbook, based on my own experience of writing the first edition of this book, which is now available in 10 languages and has been downloaded over 500,000 times since 2015. For another perspective on this, see Clive Shepherd’s blog: Weighing up the benefits of traditional book publishing.

We have seen historically that new media often do not entirely replace an older medium, but the old medium finds a new ‘niche’. Thus television did not lead to the complete demise of radio. Similarly, I suspect that there will be a continued role for the book in academic knowledge, enabling the book (whether digital or printed) to thrive alongside new media and formats in academia.

However, books that retain their value academically will likely need to be much more specific in their format and their purpose than has been the case to date. For instance, I see no future for books consisting mainly of a collection of loosely connected but semi-independent lessons from different authors, unless there is a strong cohesion and edited presence that provides an integrated argument or consistent set of data across all the lessons. Most of all, books may need to change some of their features, to allow for more interaction and input from readers, and more links to the outside world. It is much more unlikely though that books will survive in a printed format, because digital publication allows for many more features to be added, reduces the environmental footprint, and makes text much more portable and transferable.

Lastly, this is not an argument for ignoring the academic benefits of new media. The value of graphics, video and animation for representing knowledge, the ability to interact asynchronously with other learners, and the value of social networks, are all under-exploited in academia. But text and books are still important.

3.3. Text and Other Forms of Knowledge

I have focused particularly on the text and academic knowledge, because of the traditional importance of text and printed knowledge in academia. The unique pedagogical characteristics of text though maybe less for other forms of knowledge. Indeed, multimedia may have many more advantages in vocational and technical education.

In the k-12 or school sector, text and print are likely to remain important because reading and writing are likely to remain essential in a digital age, so the study of text (digital and printed) will remain important if only for developing literacy skills.

Indeed, one of the limitations of text is that it requires a high level of prior literacy skills for it to be used effectively for teaching and learning, and indeed much of teaching and learning is focused on the development of skills that enable a rigorous analysis of textual materials. Indeed reading ability is one of the core skills identified for the 21st century. Reading and writing literacy is somewhat under attack with the use of truncated language in text messages, automated spelling correction, and emotive symbols in social media. However, we should be giving as much attention to developing literacy skills in using and interpreting multimedia in a digital age.

3.4. Assessment

If text is critical for the presentation of knowledge and development of skills in your subject area, what are the implications for assessment? If students are expected to develop the skills that text appears to develop, then presumably text will be an important medium for assessment. Students will need to demonstrate their own ability to use text to present abstractions, argument, and evidence-based reasoning.

In such contexts, composed textual responses, such as essays or written reports, are likely to be necessary, rather than multiple-choice questions or multimedia reports.

3.5. More Evidence, Please

Although there has been extensive research on the pedagogical features of other media such as audio, video, and computing, the text has generally been treated as the default mode, the base against which other media are compared. As a result print, in particular, is largely taken for granted in academia. We are now though at the stage where we need to pay much more attention to the unique characteristics of text in its various formats, in relation to other media. Until though we have more empirical studies on the unique characteristics of text and print, the text will remain central to at least academic teaching and learning.

4. Audio

Durbridge, 1984

4.1. Audio: The Unappreciated Medium

We have seen that oral communication has a long history, and continues today in classroom teaching and in general radio programming. In this section, though I am focusing primarily on recorded audio, which I will argue is a very powerful educational medium when used well.

There has been a good deal of research on the unique pedagogical characteristics of audio. At the UK Open University course teams had to bid for media resources to supplement specially designed printed materials. Because media resources were developed initially by the BBC, and hence were limited and expensive to produce, course teams (in conjunction with their allocated BBC producer) had to specify how radio or television would be used to support learning. In particular, the course teams were asked to identify what teaching functions television and radio would uniquely contribute to the teaching. After the allocation and development of a course, samples of the programs were evaluated in terms of how well they met these functions, as well as how the students responded to the programming. In later years, the same approach was used when production moved to audio and video cassettes.

This process of identifying unique roles then evaluating the programs allowed the OU, over a period of several years, to identify which roles or functions were particularly appropriate to different media (Bates, 1984). Koumi (2006), himself a former BBC/OU producer followed up on this research and identified several more key functions for audio and video. Over a somewhat similar period, Richard Mayer, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was conducting his own research into the use of multimedia in education (Mayer, 2009).

Although there have been continuous developments of audio technology, from audio-cassettes to Sony Walkman’s to podcasts, the pedagogical characteristics of audio have remained remarkably constant over a fairly long period.

4.2. Presentational Features

Although audio can be used on its own, it is often used in combination with other media, particularly text. On its own, it can present:

• Spoken language (including foreign languages) for analysis or practice
• Music, either as a performance or for analysis
• Students with a condensed argument that may
• Reinforce points made elsewhere in the course
• Introduce new points not made elsewhere in the course
• Provide an alternative viewpoint to the perspectives in the rest of the course
• Analyze or critique materials elsewhere in the course
• Summarize or condense the main ideas or major points covered in the course
• Provide new evidence in support of or against the arguments or perspectives covered elsewhere in the course
• Interviews with leading researchers or experts
• Discussion between two or more people to provide various views on a topic
• Primary audio sources, such as bird song, children talking, eye witness accounts, or recorded performances (drama, concerts)
• Analysis of primary audio sources, by playing the source followed by analysis
• ‘Breaking news’ that emphasizes the relevance or application of concepts within the course
• The instructor’s personal spin on a topic related to the course

Audio however has been found to be particularly ‘potent’ when combined with text, because it enables students to use both eyes and ears in conjunction. Audio has been found to be especially useful for:

This technique was later further developed by Salman Khan, but using video to combine voice-over (audio) explanation with visual presentation of mathematical symbols, formulae, and solutions.

4.3. Skills Development

Because of the ability of the learner to stop and start recorded audio, it has been found to be particularly useful for:

• Enabling students through repetition and practice to master certain auditory skills or techniques (e.g. language pronunciation, analysis of musical structure, mathematical computation);
• Getting students to analyze primary audio sources, such as children’s use of language, or attitudes to immigration from recordings of interviewed people;
• Changing student attitudes by:
• Presenting material in a novel or unfamiliar perspective
• By presenting the material in a dramatized form, enabling students to identify with someone with a different perspective

4.4. Strengths and Weaknesses of Audio as a Teaching Medium

First, some advantages:

• It is much easier to make an audio clip or podcast than a video clip or a simulation.
• Audio requires far less bandwidth than video or simulations hence downloads quicker and can be used over relatively low bandwidths.
• It is easily combined with other media such as text, mathematical symbols, and graphics, allowing more than one sense to be used and allowing for ‘integration’.
• Some students prefer to learn by listening compared with reading.
• audio combined with text can help develop literacy skills or support students with low levels of literacy.
• Audio provides the variety and another perspective from the text, a ‘break’ in learning that refreshes the learner and maintains interest.
• Nicola Durbridge, in her research at the Open University, found that audio increased distance students’ feelings of personal ‘closeness’ with the instructor compared with video or text, i.e. it is a more intimate medium.

In particular, added flexibility and learner control means that students will often learn better from pre-prepared audio recordings combined with accompanying textual material (such as a web site with slides) then they will from a live classroom lecture.

There are also of course disadvantages of audio:

• Audio-based learning is difficult for people with a hearing disability.
• Creating audio is extra work for an instructor.
• audio is often best used in conjunction with other media such as text or graphics thus adding complexity to the design of teaching.
• Recording audio requires at least a minimal level of technical proficiency.
• Spoken language tends to be less precise than text.

Increasingly video is now being used to combine audio over images, such as in the Khan Academy, but there are many instances, such as where students are studying from prescribed texts, where recorded audio works better than a video recording.

So let’s hear it for audio!

5. Video

5.1. More Power, More Complexity

Although there have been massive changes in video technology over the last 25 years, resulting in dramatic reductions in the costs of both creating and distributing video, the unique educational characteristics are largely unaffected. (More recent computer-generated media such as simulations, will be analyzed under ‘Computing’).

Video is a much richer medium then either text or audio, as in addition to its ability to offer text and sound, it can also offer dynamic or moving pictures. Thus while it can offer all the affordances of audio, and some of the text, it also has unique pedagogical characteristics of its own. Once again, there has been considerable research on the use of video in education, and again I will be drawing on research from the Open University (Bates, 1984; 2005; Koumi, 2006) as well as from Mayer (2009).

5.2. Presentational Skills

Video can be used to:

• Demonstrate experiments or phenomena, particularly:
• Where equipment or phenomena to be observed are large, microscopic, expensive, inaccessible, dangerous, or difficult to observe without special equipment (see 
  )
• Where resources are scarce, or unsuitable for student experimentation (e.g. live animals, human body parts) (see 
  )
• Where the experimental design is complex (for example, 
  )
• Where there is an element of risk or danger in conducting the experiment (
• Where the experimental behavior may be influenced by uncontrollable but observable variables
• Illustrate principles involving dynamic change or movement (see 
  )
• Illustrate abstract principles through the use of specially constructed physical models, for instance, 
• Illustrate principles involving three-dimensional space, for example, see 
• Demonstrate changes over time through the use of animation, slow-motion, or speeded-up video (see an example of how Haemophilus influenzae cells take up DNA, from UBC)
• Demonstrate correct procedures in health, safety, repairs, and maintenance (for an example, see 
  )
• Substitute for a field visit, by:
• Providing students with an accurate, comprehensive visual picture of a site, in order to place the topic under study in context; for instance see 
• Demonstrating the relationship between different elements of a system under study (e.g. production processes, ecological balanc brady’s EMRe); for example, see the 
• By identifying and distinguishing between different classes or categories of phenomena at the site (e.g. 
  );
• To observe differences in scale and process between laboratory and mass-production techniques;
• Through the use of models, animations or simulations, to teach certain advanced scientific or technological concepts (such as theories of relativity or quantum physics) without students having to master highly advanced mathematical techniques; see for instance ‘
  .’
• Bring students primary resource or case-study material, i.e. recording of naturally occurring events which, through editing and selection, demonstrate or illustrate principles covered elsewhere in a course
• Demonstrate ways in which abstract principles or concepts developed elsewhere in the course have been applied to real-world problems, for example,
   in the University of British Columbia’s Master of Land and Water Management
• Synthesize a wide range of variables into a single recorded event, e.g. to suggest how real-world problems can be resolved
• Demonstrate decision-making processes or decisions ‘in action’ (e.g. triage in an emergency situation) by:
• Recording the decision-making process as it occurs in real contexts
• Recording ‘staged’ simulations, dramatization or role-playing, as in the scenarios in Ryerson University’s Therapeutic Communication and Mental Health Assessment Program
• Demonstrate correct procedures in using tools or equipment (including safety procedures)
• Demonstrate methods or techniques of performance (e.g. mechanical skills such as 
  , sketching, drawing or painting techniques, or dance)
• Record and archive events that are crucial to topics in a course, but which may disappear or be destroyed in the near future, such as, for instance, street graffiti or condemned buildings (see 
  )
• Demonstrate practical activities to be carried out by students, on their own (for example, see 
  )

5.3. Skills Development

This usually requires the video to be integrated with student activities. The ability to stop, rewind, and replay video becomes crucial for skills development, as student activity usually takes place separately from the actual viewing of the video. This may mean thinking through careful activities for students related to the use of video.

If video is not used directly for lecturing, research clearly indicates that students generally need to be guided as to what to look for in the video, at least initially in their use of video for learning. There are various techniques for relating concrete events with abstract principles, such as through audio narration over the video, using a still frame to highlight the observation, or repeating a small section of the program. Bates and Gallagher (1977) found that using video for developing higher-order analysis or evaluation was a teachable skill that needs to be built into the development of a course or the program, to get the best results.

Typical uses of video for skills development include:

• Enabling students to recognize naturally occurring phenomena or classifications (e.g. 
  , 
  , 
  ) in context
• Enabling students to analyse a situation, using principles either introduced in the video recording or covered elsewhere in the course, such as a textbook or lecture; for example, 
• Interpreting artistic performance (e.g. drama, spoken poetry, movies, 
  , sculpture, or other works of art)
• Analysis of music composition, through the use of 
  , narration and graphics
• Testing the applicability or relevance of abstract concepts or generalisations in real world contexts (see for example 
  )
• Looking for alternative explanations for real world phenomena.

There are many ways in which video can be used for skills development. Nevertheless, however, video is used for skill development, as well as the demonstration of the skill, attention must be paid to ensuring opportunities for student practice and feedback, probably using other media, although it is now increasingly easy for students to make their own videos to demonstrate their skill.

5.4. Strengths and Weaknesses of Video as a Teaching Medium

One factor that makes video powerful for learning is its ability to show the relationship between concrete examples and abstract principles, with usually the sound track relating the abstract principles to concrete events shown in the video (see, for example: Probability for quantum chemistry, UBC). Video is particularly useful for recording events or situations where it would be too difficult, dangerous, expensive or impractical to bring students to such events.

Thus its main strengths are as follows:

• Linking concrete events and phenomena to abstract principles and vice versa
• The ability of students to stop and start, so they can integrate activities with video
• Providing an alternative approach to the presentation of content that can help students having difficulties in learning abstract concepts
• Adding substantial interest to a course by linking it to real-world issues
• A growing amount of freely available, high-quality academic videos
• Good for developing some of the higher-level intellectual skills and some of the more practical skills needed in a digital age
• The use of low cost cameras and free editing software enables some forms of video to be cheaply produced

It should also be remembered that in addition to the features listed above, video can incorporate many of the features of audio as well.

The main weaknesses of video are:

• Many faculty have no knowledge or experience in using video other than for recording lecturing
• There is currently a limited amount of high-quality educational video free for downloading, because the cost of developing high-quality educational video that exploits the unique characteristics of the medium are still relatively high. Links also often go dead after a while, affecting the reliability of outsourced video. The availability of free material for educational use is improving all the time, but currently finding appropriate and free videos that meet the specific needs of a teacher or instructor can be time-consuming or such material may just not be available or reliable
• Creating original material that exploits the unique characteristics of the video is time-consuming, and still relatively expensive, because it usually needs professional video production
• To get the most out of educational video, students need specially designed activities that often will have to sit outside the video itself
• Students often reject videos that require them to do analysis or interpretation; they often prefer direct instruction that focuses primarily on comprehension. Such students need to be trained to use video differently, which requires time to be devoted to developing such skills

For these reasons, video is not being used enough in education. When used it is often an afterthought or an ‘extra’, rather than an integral part of the design, or is used merely to replicate a classroom lecture, rather than exploiting the unique characteristics of video.

5.5. Assessment

If video is being used to develop the skills outlined in Section 8.4.3, then it is essential that these skills are assessed and count for grading. Indeed, one possible means of an assessment might be to ask students to analyse or interpret a selected video, or even to develop their own media project, using video they themselves have collected or produced, using their own devices.

6. Computing

6.1. A Volatile and Comprehensive Medium

It is debatable whether computing should be considered a medium, but I am using the term broadly, and not in the technical sense of writing code. I prefer ‘computing’ to ‘ICTs’ (information and communications technologies). Computing is a medium while ICT refers more to the technologies used. The Internet in particular is an all-embracing medium that accommodates text, audio, video, and computing, as well as providing other elements such as distributed communication and access to educational opportunities. Computing is also still an area that is fast developing, with new products and services emerging all the time. Indeed, I will treat recent developments in social media and some emerging technologies separately from computing, although technically they are sub-categories of computing. Once again, though, social media and some emerging technologies contain affordances that are not so prevalent in more conventional computing-based learning environments.

In such a volatile medium, it would be foolish to be dogmatic about unique media characteristics, but once again, the purpose of this lesson is not to provide a definitive analysis, but a way of thinking about technology that will facilitate an instructor’s choice and the use of technology. The focus is: what are the pedagogical affordances of computing that are different from those of other media (other then the important fact that it can embrace all the other media characteristics)?

Although there has been a great deal of research into computers in education, there has been less focus on the specifics of its pedagogical media characteristics, although a great deal of interesting research and development has taken place and continues in human-machine interaction and to a lesser extent in artificial intelligence. Thus I am relying more on analysis and experience than research on the unique affordances or characteristics of computing as an educational medium in this section.

6.2. Presentational Features

Presentation is not really where the educational strength of computing lies. It can represent text and audio reasonably well, and video less well, because of the limited size of the screen (and video often has to share screen space with text), and the bandwidth/pixels/download time required. Screen size can be a real presentational limitation with smaller, mobile devices, although tablets such as the iPad are a major advance in screen quality.

However, unlike the other media, computing enables the end-user to interact directly with the medium, to the extent that the end-user (in education, the student) can add to, change or interact with the content, at least to a certain extent. Also, more controversially, computing can automatically collect end-user responses for analytics. In this sense, computing comes closer to a complete, if virtual, learning environment.

Thus in presentational terms computing can be used to:

• Create and present original teaching content in a rich and varied way (using a combination of text, audio, video, and webinars).
• Enable access to other sources of secondary ‘rich’ content through the Internet.
• Enable students to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously with the instructor and other students.
• Structure and manage content through the use of web sites, learning management systems, video servers, and other similar technologies.
• Create virtual worlds or virtual environments/contexts through technology such as animations, simulations, augmented or virtual reality, and serious games.
• Set multiple-choice tests, automatically mark such tests and provide immediate feedback to learners.
• Enable learners digitally to submit written (essay-type), or multimedia (project-based) assignments through the use of e-portfolios.

6.3. Skills Development

Skills development in a computing environment will once again depend very much on the epistemological approach to teaching. Computing can be used to focus on comprehension and understanding, through a behaviourist approach to computer-based learning (present/test/feedback). However, the communications element of computing also enables more constructivist approaches, through online student discussion and student-created multimedia work.

Thus computing can be used (uniquely) to:

• Develop and test student comprehension of content through computer-based learning/testing.
• Develop computer coding and other computer-based skills.
• Develop decision-making skills through the use of digitally-based simulations and/or virtual worlds.
• Develop skills of reasoning, evidence-based argument, and collaboration through instructor-moderated online discussion forums.
• Enable students to create their own artifacts/online multimedia work through the use of e-portfolios, thus improving their digital communication skills as well as assessing better what they have learned.
• Develop skills of experimental design, through the use of simulations, virtual laboratory equipment and remote labs.
• Develop skills of knowledge management and problem-solving, by requiring students to find, analyze, evaluate and apply content, accessed through the Internet, to real world problems.
• Develop spoken and written language skills through both presentation of language and through communication with other students and/or native language speakers via the Internet.
• Collect data on end-user/student interactions with computer and associated equipment such as mobile phones and tablets for:
• Learning analytics, which can be used to identify weaknesses in the design of the teaching, and student success and failure regarding learning outcomes, including skills development, as well as identifying at-risk students
• Adaptive learning, offering learners alternative routes through learning materials, providing an element of personalization
• Assessment (including monitoring)
• Automated or human feedback

These affordances are in addition to the affordances that other media can support within a broader computing environment.

6.4. Strengths and Weaknesses of Computing as a Teaching Medium

Many teachers and instructors avoid the use of computing because they fear it may be used to replace them, or because they believe it results in a very mechanical approach to teaching and learning. This is not helped by misinformed computer scientists, politicians, and industry leaders who argue that computers can replace or reduce the need for humans in teaching. Both viewpoints show a misunderstanding of both the sophistication and complexity of teaching and learning and the flexibility and advantages that computing can bring to teaching.

So here are some of the advantages of computing as a teaching medium:

• It is a very powerful teaching medium in terms of its unique pedagogical characteristics, in that it can combine the pedagogical characteristics of text, audio, video and computing in an integrated manner.
• It's unique pedagogical characteristics are useful for teaching many of the skills learners need in a digital age.
• Computing can enable learners to have more power and choice in accessing and creating their own learning and learning contexts.
• Computing can enable learners to interact directly with learning materials and receive immediate feedback, thus, when well designed, increasing the speed and depth of their learning.
• Computing can enable anyone with Internet access and a computing device to study or learn at any time or place.
• Computing can enable regular and frequent communication between student, instructors and other students.
• Computing is flexible enough to be used to support a wide range of teaching philosophies and approaches.
• Computing can help with some of the ‘grunt’ work in assessment and tracking of student performance, freeing up an instructor to focus on the more complex forms of assessment and interaction with students.

On the other hand, the disadvantages of computing are:

• Many teachers and instructors often have no training in or awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of computing as a teaching medium.
• Computing is too often oversold as a panacea for education; it is a powerful teaching medium, but it needs to be managed and controlled by educators.
• The traditional user interface for computing, such as pull-down menus, cursor screen navigation, touch control, and an algorithmic-based filing or storage system, while all very functional, is not intuitive and can be quite restricting from an educational point of view. Voice recognition and Search interfaces such as Siri and Alexa are an advance and have potential for education, but at present, they have not been used extensively as educational tools (at least by instructors).
• There is a tendency for computer scientists and engineers to adopt behaviourist approaches to the use of computing for education, which not only alienates constructivist-oriented teachers and learners, but also underestimates or underuses the true power of computing for teaching and learning.
• Despite computing’s power as a teaching medium, there are many aspects of teaching and learning that requires direct interaction between a student and teacher – and between students – even or especially in a fully online environment. The importance of face-to-face, human-to-human contact is probably greater the younger or the less mature the learner, but there will still, be many learning contexts where face-to-face contact is necessary or highly desirable even for older or mature learners. The importance of frequent face-to-face teacher-student interaction  is also probably less than many instructors believe, but more than many advocates of computer learning understand. It is not either/or, but finding the right balance in the right context.
• Computing needs the input and management of teachers and educators, and to some extent learners, to determine the conditions under which computing can best operate as a teaching medium; and teachers need to be in control of the decisions on when and how to use computing for teaching and learning.
• To use computing well, teachers need to work closely with other specialists, such as instructional designers and computer scientists.

The issue around the value of computing as a medium for teaching is less about its pedagogical value and more about control. Because of the complexity of teaching and learning, it is essential that the use of computing for teaching and learning is controlled and managed by educators. As long as teachers and instructors have control, and have the necessary knowledge and training about the pedagogical advantages and limitations of computing, then computing is an essential medium for teaching in a digital age.

6.5. Assessment

There is a tendency to focus assessment in computing on multiple-choice questions and ‘correct’ answers. Although this form of assessment has its value in assessing comprehension and for testing a limited range of mechanical procedures, computing also supports a wider range of assessment techniques, from learner-created blogs and wikis to e-portfolios. These more flexible forms of computer-based assessment are more in alignment with measuring the knowledge and skills that many learners will need in a digital age.

7. Social Media

Although social media are mainly Internet-based and hence a sub-category of computing, there are enough significant differences between educational social media use and computer-based learning or online collaborative learning to justify treating social media as a separate medium, although of course, they are dependent and often fully integrated with other forms of computing. The main difference is in the extent of control over learning that social media offer to learners.

7.1. What are Social Media?

Around 2005, a new range of web tools began to find their way into general use, and increasingly into educational use. These can be loosely described as social media, as they reflect a different culture of web use from the former ‘center-to-periphery’ push of institutional web sites.

Here are some of the tools and their uses (there are many more possible examples: click on each example for an educational application):

The main feature of social media is that they empower the end-user to access, create, disseminate, and share information easily in a user-friendly, open environment. Usually, the only direct cost is the time of the end-user. There are often few controls over content, other than those normally imposed by a state or government (such as libel or pornography). One feature of such tools is to empower the end-user – the learner or customer – to self-access and manage data (such as online banking) and to form personal networks (for example through FaceBook). For these reasons, some have called social media the ‘democratization’ of the web, although at the same time one could argue that social media are now heavily commercialized through advertising.

In general, social media tools are based on very simple software, in that, they have relatively few lines of code. As a result, new tools and applications (‘apps’) are constantly emerging, and their use is either free or very low cost. For a good broad overview of the use of social media in education, see Lee and McCoughlin (2011).

7.2. General Affordances of Social Media

The concept of ‘affordances’ is frequently used in discussions of social media. McLoughlin & Lee (2011) identify the following ‘affordances’ associated with social media (although they use the term web 2.0) in general:

• Connectivity and social rapport
• Collaborative information discovery and sharing
• Content creation
• Knowledge and information aggregation and content modification

However, we need to specify more directly the unique pedagogical characteristics of social media.

7.3. Presentational Characteristics

Social media enable:

• Networked multimedia communication between self-organizing groups of learners.
• Access to rich, multimedia content available over the Internet at any time or place, as long as there is a suitable Internet connection.
• Learner-generated multimedia materials.
• Opportunities to expand learning beyond ‘closed’ courses and institutional boundaries.

7.4. Skills Development

Social media, when well designed within an educational framework, can help with the development of the following skills (click on each to see examples):

• Digital literacy: this web site was designed by the Library at the University of British Columbia to enable students to manage their digital identity
• Independent and self-directed learning: this is a Wiki built by UBC math graduate students to provide assistance to undergraduate students in their exams
• Collaboration/collaborative learning/teamwork; this was a class project to build Wikipedia entries on Latin American literature by a third-year undergraduate class at UBC
• Internationalisation/development of global citizens
• Networking and other inter-personal skills
• Knowledge management; students at UBC use social media to research emerging technologies and build a possible educational business around the technology
• Decision-making in specific contexts (for example, emergency management, law enforcement)

7.5. Strengths and Weaknesses of Social Media

Some of the advantages of social media are as follows:

• They can be extremely useful for developing some of the key skills needed in a digital age, such as digital communication skills.
• They can enable teachers to set online group work, based on cases or projects, and students can collect data in the field using social media such as mobile phones or iPads.
• Learners can post-media-rich assignments either individually or as a group.
• These assignments, when assessed, can be loaded by the learner into their own personal learning environment or e-portfolios for later use when seeking employment or transfer to graduate school.
• Learners can take more control over their own learning, as we have seen in connectivist MOOCs.
• Through the use of blogs and wikis, courses and learning can be thrown open to the world, adding richness and wider perspectives to learning.

However, many students are not, at least initially, independent learners (see Candy, 1991). Many students come to a learning task without the necessary skills or confidence to study independently from scratch (Moore and Thompson, 1990). They need structured support, structured and selected content, and recognized accreditation. The advent of new tools that give students more control over their learning will not necessarily change their need for a structured educational experience. However, learners can be taught the skills needed to become independent learners (Moore, 1973; Marshall and Rowland, 1993). Social media can make the learning of how to learn much more effective but still only in most cases within an initially structured environment.

The use of social media raises the inevitable issue of quality. How can learners differentiate between reliable, accurate, authoritative information, and inaccurate, biased or unsubstantiated information, if they are encouraged to roam free? What are the implications for expertise and specialist knowledge, when everyone has a view on everything? As Andrew Keen (2007) has commented, ‘we are replacing the tyranny of experts with the tyranny of idiots.’ Not all information is equal, nor are all opinions.

These are key challenges for the digital age, but as well as being part of the problem, social media can also be part of the solution. Teachers can consciously use social media for the development of knowledge management and the responsible use of social media, but the development of such knowledge and skills through the use of social media will need a teacher-supported environment. Many students look for structure and guidance in their learning, and it is the responsibility of teachers to provide it. We, therefore, need a middle ground between the total authority and control of the teacher, and the complete anarchy of the children roaming free on a desert island in the novel “Lord of the Flies” (Golding, 1954). Social media allow for such a middle ground, but only if as teachers we have a clear pedagogy or educational philosophy to guide our choices and use of the technology.

8. A Framework for Analysing the Pedagogical Characteristics of Educational Media

8.1. Brief Summary of Pedagogical Differences in Media

I will now summarise the unique pedagogical characteristics of the different media discussed in this lesson.

Figure 24 presents a diagrammatic analysis of various learning media. I have arranged them primarily by where they fit along an epistemological continuum of objectivist (black), constructivist (blue), and connectivist (red), but also I have used two other dimensions, teacher control/learner control, and credit/non-credit. Note that this figure also enables traditional teaching modes, such as lectures and seminars, to be included and compared. Figure 8.8.1 represents my personal interpretation of these media, and other teachers or instructors may well re-arrange the diagram differently, depending on their particular applications of these tools.

Not all tools or media are represented here (for example, audio, and video or MOOCs). The position of any particular tool in the diagram will depend on its actual use. Learning management systems can be used in a constructivist way, and blogs can be very teacher-controlled if the teacher is the only one permitted to use a blog on a course. Badia et al (2011) have shown that educational design and the situational use of technology very much influence whether specific affordances or unique characteristics of a medium are successfully exploited. Student preferences or pre-dispositions can inhibit or support the successful implementation of specific affordances of different media (for instance, computer science students’ preferences for adaptive learning rather than the communication and discussion affordances of ICT – Arenas, 2015).

However, the aim here is not to provide a cast-iron categorization of the affordances of different educational media, but to provide a framework for teachers in deciding which tools and media are most likely to suit a particular teaching approach. Indeed, other teachers may prefer a different set of pedagogical values as a framework for analysis of the different media and technologies.

However, to give an example from Figure 24, a teacher may use an LMS to organize a set of resources, guidelines, procedures, and deadlines for students, who then may use several of the social media, such as photos from mobile phones to collect data. The teacher provides a space and structure on the LMS for students’ learning materials in the form of an e-portfolio, to which students can load their work. Students in small groups can use discussion forums or FaceBook to work on projects together.

The example above is in the framework of a course for credit, but the framework would also fit the non-institutional or informal approach to the use of social media for learning, with a focus on tools such as FaceBook, blogs, and YouTube. These applications would be much more learner-driven, with the learner deciding on the tools and their uses. The most powerful examples are connectivist or cMOOCs.

9. Models for Media Selection

9.1. What the Literature Tells Us

Given the importance of the topic, there is relatively little literature on how to choose appropriate media or technologies for teaching. There was a flurry of not very helpful publications on this topic in the 1970s and 1980s, but relatively little since (Baytak, undated). Indeed, Koumi (1994) stated that:

Mackenzie (2002) comments in a similar vein:

Mackenzie (2002) has suggested building technology selection around Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory (Gardner, 1983, 2006), following the following sequence of decisions:

Learner → Teaching Objective → Intelligences → Media Choice

Mackenzie then allocates different media to support the development of each of Gardner’s intelligence. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has been widely tested and adopted, and Mackenzie’s allocations of media to intelligence make sense intuitively, but of course it is dependent on teachers and instructors applying Gardner’s theory to their teaching.

A review of more recent publications on media selection suggest that despite the rapid developments in media and technology over the last 20 years, my ACTIONS model (Bates, 1995) is one of the major models still being applied, although with further amendments and additions (see, for instance, Baytak, undated; Lambert and Williams, 1999; Koumi, 2006). Indeed, I myself modified the ACTIONS model, which was developed for distance education, to the SECTIONS model to cover the use of media in campus-based as well as distance education (Bates and Poole, 2003).

Patsula (2002) developed a model called CASCOIME which includes some of the criteria in the Bates models, but also adds additional and valuable criteria such as socio-political suitability, cultural friendliness, and openness/flexibility, to take into account international perspectives. Zaied (2007) conducted an empirical study to test what criteria for media selection were considered important by faculty, IT specialists and students, and identified seven criteria. Four of these matched or were similar to Bates’ criteria. The other three were student satisfaction, student self-motivation and professional development, which is more like conditions for success and is not really easy to identify before making a decision.

Koumi (2006) and Mayer (2009) have come closest to developing models of media selection. Mayer has developed twelve principles of multimedia design based on extensive research, resulting in what Mayer calls a cognitive theory of multimedia learning. (For an excellent application of Mayer’s theory, see UBC Wikis.) Koumi (2015) more recently has developed a model for deciding on the best mix and use of video and print to guide the design of xMOOCs.

Mayer’s approach is valuable at a more micro-level when it comes to designing specific multimedia educational materials, as is Koumi’s work. Mayer’s cognitive theory of multimedia design suggests the best combination of words and images, and rules to follow such as ensuring coherence and avoiding cognitive overload. When deciding to use a specific application of multimedia, it provides very strong guidelines. It is nevertheless more difficult to apply at a macro level. Because Mayer’s focus is on cognitive processing, his theory does not deal directly with the unique pedagogical affordances or characteristics of different media. Neither Mayer nor Koumi address non-pedagogical issues in media selection, such as cost or access. Mayer and Koumi’s work is not so much competing as complementary to what I am proposing. I am trying to identify which media (or combinations of media) to use in the first place. Mayer’s theory then would guide the actual design of the application. I will discuss Mayer’s twelve principles further in Section 5 of this lesson, which deals with teaching functions.

Puentedura’s SAMR model (2014), is valuable for assessing the choice of a particular medium, but it focuses solely on pedagogical issues, particularly in terms of whether the choice augments or transforms learning. Although this is a powerful criterion for media selection, the SAMR model does not take into account other essential factors in media selection, such as cost or ease of use.

It is not surprising that there are not many models for media selection. The models developed in the 1970s and 1980s took a very reductionist, behaviourist approach to media selection, resulting in often several pages of decision-trees, which are completely impractical to apply, given the realities of teaching, and yet these models still included no recognition of the unique affordances of different media. More importantly, technology is subject to rapid change, there are competing views on appropriate pedagogical approaches to teaching, and the context of learning varies so much. Finding a practical, manageable model founded on research and experience that can be widely applied has proved to be challenging.

9.2. Why We Need a Model

At the same time, every teacher, instructor, and increasingly learner, needs to make decisions in this area, often on a daily basis. A model for technology selection and application is needed therefore that has the following characteristics:

• It will work in a wide variety of learning contexts.
• It allows decisions to be taken at both a strategic, institution-wide level and at a tactical, instructional, level.
• It gives equal attention to educational and operational issues.
• It will identify critical differences between different media and technologies, thus enabling an appropriate mix to be chosen for any given context.
• It is easily understood, pragmatic, and cost-effective.
• It will accommodate new developments in technology.

For these reasons, then, I will continue to use the Bates’ SECTIONS model, with some modifications to take account of recent developments in technology, research and theory. The SECTIONS model is based on research, has stood the test of time, and has been found to be practical. SECTIONS stands for:

• S tudents
• E ase of use
• C ost
• T eaching functions, including pedagogical affordances of media
• I nteraction
• O rganizational issues
• N etworking
• S ecurity and privacy

I will discuss each of these criteria in the following sections, and will then suggest how to apply the model.

10. Students

The first criterion in the SECTIONS model is students. At least three issues related to students need to be considered when choosing media and technology:

• Student demographics
• Access
• Differences in how students learn

10.1. Student Demographics

One of the fundamental changes resulting from mass higher education is that university and college teachers must now teach an increasingly diverse range of students. This increasing diversity of students presents major challenges for all teachers, not just post-secondary teachers. However, it has been less common for instructors at a post-secondary level to vary their approach within a single course to accommodate to learner differences, but the increasing diversity of students now require that all courses should be developed with a wide variety of approaches and ways to learn if all students in the course are to be taught well.

In particular, it is important to be clear about the needs of the target group. First and second-year students straight from high school are likely to require more support and help to study at a university or college level. They are likely to be less independent as learners, and therefore it may be a mistake to expect them to be able to study entirely through the use of technology. However, technology may be useful as a support for classroom teaching, especially if it provides an alternative approach to learning from face-to-face teaching, and is gradually introduced, to prepare them for more independent study later in a program.

On the other hand, for students who have already been through higher education as a campus student, but are now in the workforce, a program delivered entirely by technology at a distance is likely to be attractive. Such students will have already developed successful study skills will have their own community and family life and will welcome the flexibility of studying this way.

The third and fourth year undergraduate students may appreciate a mix of classroom-based and online study or even one or two fully online courses, especially if some of their face-to-face classes are closed to further enrolments, or if students are working part-time to help cover some of the costs of being at college.

Lastly, within any single class or group of learners, there will be a wide range of differences in prior knowledge, language skills, and preferred study styles. The intelligent use of media and technology can help accommodate these differences. In particular, if you are trying to reach students in remote areas, or homeless or poor people, or students with physical disabilities, then this too should influence your choice of technology. Indeed, for most courses, there is likely to be a mix of different student needs, which suggests that a multi-media approach will be necessary to accommodate all student needs.

So, once again, it is important to know your students, and to keep this in mind when making decisions about what media or technology to use.

10.2. Access

Of all the criteria in determining the choice of technology, this is perhaps the most discriminating. No matter how powerful in educational terms a particular medium or technology may be, if students cannot access it in a convenient and affordable manner they cannot learn from it. Thus video streaming may be considered a great way to get lectures to students off-campus, but if they do not have Internet access at home, or if it takes four hours or a day’s wages to download, then forget it. The difficulty of access is a particular restriction on using xMOOCs in developing countries. Even if potential learners have Internet or mobile phone access, which 3.8 billion globally still do not (ITU, 2018), it often costs a day’s wages to download a single YouTube video – see Marron, Missen and Greenberg, 2014.

Any teacher or instructor intending to use computers, tablets or mobile phones for teaching purposes need answers to a number of questions:

• What is the institutional policy with regard to students’ access to a computer, tablets or mobile phones?
• Can students use any device or is there a limited list of devices that the institution will support?
• Is the medium or software chosen for teaching compatible with all makes of devices students might use?
• Is the network adequate to support any extra students that this initiative will add?
• Who else in the institution needs to know that you are requiring students to use particular devices?

If students are expected to provide their own devices (which increasingly makes sense):

• What kind of device do they need: one at home with Internet access or a portable that they can bring on to campus – or one that can be used both at home and on campus?
• What kind of applications will they need to run on their device(s) for study purposes?
• Will they be able to use the same device(s) across all courses, or will they need different software/apps and devices for different courses?
• What skills will students need in operating the devices and the apps that will be run on them?
• If students do not have the skills, would it still be worth their learning them, and will there be time set aside in the course for them to learn these skills?

Students (as well as the instructor) need to know the answers to these questions before they enroll in a course or program. In order to answer these questions, you and your department must know what students will use their devices for. There is no point in requiring students to go to the expense of purchasing a laptop computer if the work they are required to do on it is optional or trivial. This means some advance planning on your part:

• What are the educational advantages that you see in student use of a particular device?
• What will students need to do on the device in your course?
• Is it really essential for them to use a device in these ways, or could they easily manage without the device? In particular, how will the assessment be linked to the use of the device?

It will really help if your institution has good policies in place for student technology access. If the institution does not have clear policies or infrastructure for supporting the technologies you want to use, then your job is going to be a lot harder.

The answer to the question of access and the choice of technology will also depend somewhat on the mandate of the institution and your personal educational goals. For instance, highly selective universities can require students to use particular devices and can help the relatively few students who have financial difficulties in purchasing and using specified devices. If though the mandate of the institution is to reach learners denied access to conventional institutions, equity groups, the unemployed, the working poor, or workers needing up-grading or more advanced education and training, then it becomes critical to find out what technology they have access to or are willing to use. If an institution’s policy is open access to anyone who wants to take its courses, the availability of equipment already in the home (usually purchased for entertainment purposes) becomes of paramount importance.

Another important factor to consider is access for students with disabilities. This may mean providing textual or audio options for deaf and visually impaired students respectively. Fortunately, there are now well-established practices and standards under the general heading of Universal Design standards. Universal Design is defined as follows:

Brokop, F. (2008)

Most institutions with a centre for supporting teaching and learning will be able to provide assistance to faculty to ensure the course meets universal design standards. For instance, BCcampus has produced an accessibility toolkit (Coolidge et l., 2018) and Norquest College, Alberta, has published a detailed guide to ensuring online materials are accessible for persons with disabilities.

10.3. Student Differences with Respect to Learning with Technologies

It may seem obvious that different students will have different preferences for different kinds of technology or media. The design of teaching would cater for these differences. Thus if students are ‘visual’ learners, they would be provided with diagrams and illustrations. If they are auditory learners, they will prefer lectures and podcasts. It might appear then that identifying dominant learning styles should then provide strong criteria for media and technology selection. However, it is not as simple as that.

McLoughlin (1999), in a thoughtful review of the implications of the research literature on learning styles for the design of instructional material concluded that instruction could be designed to accommodate differences in both cognitive-perceptual learning styles and Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle. In a study of new intakes conducted over several years at the University of Missouri-Columbia, using the Myers-Briggs inventory, Schroeder (1993) found that new students think concretely, and are uncomfortable with abstract ideas and ambiguity.

However, a major function of a university education is to develop skills of abstract thinking and to help students deal with complexity and uncertainty. Perry (1970) found that learning in higher education is a developmental process. It is not surprising then that many students enter college or university without such ‘academic’ skills. Indeed, there are major problems in trying to apply learning styles and other methods of classifying learner differences to media and technology selection and use. Laurillard (2001) makes the point that looking at learning styles in the abstract is not helpful. Learning has to be looked at in context. Thinking skills in one subject area do not necessarily transfer well to another subject area. There are ways of thinking that are specific to different subject areas. Thus logical-rational thinkers in science do not necessarily make thoughtful husbands or good literary critics.

Part of university education is to understand and possibly challenge predominant modes of thinking in a subject area. While learner-centered teaching is important, students need to understand the inherent logic, standards, and values of a subject area. They also need to be challenged and encouraged to think outside the box. In particular, at a university level, we need strategies to gradually move students from concrete learning based on personal experience to abstract, reflective learning that can then be applied to new contexts and situations.

Thus when designing courses, it is important to offer a range of options for student learning within the same course. One way to do this is to make sure that a course is well structured, with relevant ‘core’ information easily available to all students, but also to make sure that there are opportunities for students to seek out new or different content. This content should be available in a variety of media such as text, diagrams, and video, with concrete examples explicitly related to underlying principles. The increasing availability of open educational resources makes the provision of this ‘richness’ of possible content much more viable.

Similarly, technology enables a range of learner activities to be made available, such as researching readings on the Web, online discussion forums, synchronous presentations, assessment through e-portfolios, and online group work. The range of activities increases the likelihood that a variety of learner preferences are being met, and also encourages learners to involve themselves in activities and approaches to learning where they may initially feel less comfortable. Thus it is important to ensure that students have a wide range of media (text, audio, video, computing) within a course or program.

Lastly, one should be careful in the assumptions made about student preferences for learning through digital technologies. On the one hand, technology ‘boosters’ such as Mark Prensky (2001) and Don Tapscott (2008) have argued that today’s ‘digital natives’ are different from previous generations of students. They argue that today’s students live within a networked digital universe and therefore expect their learning also to be all digitally networked. It is also true that professors, in particular, tend to underestimate students’ access to advanced technologies (professors are often late adopters of new technology), so you should always try to find up-to-date information on what devices and technologies students are currently using it, if you can.

On the other hand, it is also dangerous to assume that all students are highly ‘digital literate’ and are demanding that new technologies should be used in teaching. Jones and Shao (2011) conducted a thorough review of the literature on ‘digital natives’, with over 200 appropriate references, including surveys of relevant publications from countries in Europe, Asia, North America, Australia and South Africa. They concluded that:

• Students vary widely in their use and knowledge of digital media.
• The gap between students and their teachers in terms of digital literacy is not fixed, nor is the gulf so large that it cannot be bridged.
• There is little evidence that students enter university with demands for new technologies that teachers and universities cannot meet.
• Students will respond positively to changes in teaching and learning strategies that include the use of new technologies that are well-conceived, well explained and properly embedded in courses and degree programmes. However, there is no evidence of a pent-up demand amongst students for changes in pedagogy or of a demand for greater collaboration.
• The development of university infrastructure, technology policies, and teaching objectives should be choices about the kinds of provision that the university wishes to make and not a response to general statements about what a new generation of students is demanding.
• The evidence indicates that young students do not form a generational cohort and they do not express consistent or generationally organized demands, thus challenging general assumptions about the differences between post-millennials, millennials, generation x, and boomers in the way that they learn.

Graduating students that have been interviewed about learning technologies at the University of British Columbia made it clear that they will be happy to use technology for learning so long as it contributes to their success (in the words of one student, ‘if it will get me better grades’) but the students also made it clear that it was the instructor’s responsibility to decide what technology was best for their studies.

It is also important to pay attention to what Jones and Shao are not saying. They are not saying that social media, personal learning environments, or collaborative learning are inappropriate, nor that the needs of students and the workforce are unchanging or unimportant, but the use of these tools or approaches should be driven by a holistic look at the needs of all students, the needs of the subject area, and the learning goals relevant to a digital age, and not by an erroneous view of what a particular generation of students are demanding.

In summary, one great advantage of the intelligent application of technology to teaching is that it provides opportunities for students to learn in a variety of ways, thus adapting the teaching more easily to student differences. Thus, the first step in media selection is to know your students, their similarities and differences, what technologies they already have access to, and what digital skills they already possess or lack that may be relevant for your courses. This is likely to require the use of a wide range of media within the teaching to accommodate these differences.

10.4. The Information You Need About Your Students

It is critical to know your students. In particular, you need the following information to provide an appropriate context for decisions about media and technology:

• What is the mandate or policy of your institution, department, or program with respect to student access in general (selective vs open; accommodation of disabilities, etc.)? How will students who do not have access to a chosen technology be supported?
• What are the likely demographics of the students you will be teaching? How appropriate is the technology you are thinking of using for these students?
• If your students are to be taught at least partly off-campus, to which technologies are they likely to have convenient and regular access at home or work?
• If students are to be taught at least partly on campus, what is – or should be – your or your department’s policy with regard to students’ access to devices in class?
• What digital skills do you expect your students to have before they start the program?
• If students are expected to provide their own access to technology, will you be able to provide unique teaching experiences that will justify the purchase or use of such technology?
• What prior approaches to learning are the students likely to bring to your program? How suitable are such prior approaches to learning likely to be to the way you need to teach the course? How could technology be used to cater for student differences in learning?

There are many different ways to get the information needed to answer these questions. In many cases, you will still have to make decisions on insufficient evidence, but the more accurate information you have about your potential students, the better your likely choice of media and technology. Almost certainly, though, you will have a variety and diversity of students, so the design of your teaching will need to accommodate this.

11. Ease of Use

11.1. Keep it Simple

In most cases, the use of technology in teaching is a means, not an end. Therefore it is important that students and teachers do not have to spend a great deal of time on learning how to use educational technologies, or on making the technologies work. The exceptions of course are where technology is the area of study, such as computer science or engineering, or where learning the use of software tools is critical for some aspects of the curriculum, for instance, computer-aided design in architecture, spreadsheets in business studies, and geographical information systems in geology. In most cases, though, the aim of the study is not to learn how to use a particular piece of educational technology, but the study of history, mathematics, or biology.

One advantage of face-to-face teaching is that it needs relatively little advance preparation time compared with for instance developing a fully online course. Media and technologies vary in their capacity for speed of implementation and flexibility in updating. For instance, blogs are much quicker and easier to develop and distribute than virtual reality. Teachers and instructors then are much more likely to use technology that is quick and easy to use, and students likewise will expect such features in technology they are to use for studying. However, what’s ‘easy’ for instructors and students to use will depend on their digital literacy.

11.2. Computer and Information Literacy

If a great deal of time has to be spent by the students and teachers in learning how to use for instance software for the development or delivery of course material, this distracts from the learning and teaching. Of course, there is a basic set of literacy skills that will be required, such as the ability to read and write, to use a keyboard, to use word processing software, to navigate the Internet and use Internet software, and increasingly to use mobile devices. These generic skills though could be considered pre-requisites. If students have not adequately developed these skills in school, then an institution might provide preparatory courses for students on these topics.

It will make life a lot easier for both teachers and students if an institution has strategies for supporting students’ use of digital media. For instance, at the University of British Columbia, the Digital Tattoo project prepares students for learning online in a number of ways:

• Introducing students to a range of technologies that could be used for their learning, such as learning management systems, open educational resources, moods, and e-portfolios.
• Explaining what’s involved in studying online or at a distance.
• Setting out the opportunities and risks of social media.
• Advice on how to protect their privacy.
• How to make most of connecting, networking, and online searching.
• How to prevent cyber-bullying.
• Maintaining a professional online presence.

If your institution does not have something similar, then you could direct your students to the Digital Tattoo site, which is fully open.

It is not only students though who may need prior preparation. Technology can be too seductive. You can start using it without fully understanding its structure or how it works. Even a short period of training – an hour or less – on how to use common technologies such as a learning management system or lecture capture could save you a lot of time and more importantly, enable you to see the potential value of all features and not just those that you stumble across.

11.3. Orientation

A useful standard or criterion for the selection of course media or software is that ‘novice’ students (students who have never used the software before) should be studying within 20 minutes of logging on. This 20 minutes may be needed to work out some of the key functions of the software that may be unfamiliar or to work out how the course Web site is organized and navigated. This is more of an orientation period though than learning new skills of computing. If there is a need to introduce new software that may take a little time to learn, for instance, a synchronous ‘chat’ facility, or video streaming, it should be introduced at the point where it is needed. It is important though to provide time within the course for the students to learn how to do this.

11.4. Interface Design

The critical factor in making technology transparent is the design of the interface between the user and the machine. Thus an educational program or indeed any Web site should be well structured, intuitive for the user to use, and easy to navigate.

Interface design is a highly skilled profession, and is based on a combination of scientific research into how humans learn, an understanding of how operating software works, and good training in graphic design. This is one reason why it is often wise to use software or tools that have been well established in education, because these have been tested and been found to work well.

The traditional generic interface of computers – a keyboard, mouse, and graphic user interface of windows and pull-down menus and pop-up instructions – is still extremely crude, and not isomorphic with most people’s preferences for processing information. It places a very heavy emphasis on literacy skills and a preference for visual learning. This can cause major difficulties for students with certain disabilities, such as dyslexia or poor eyesight. However, in recent years, interfaces have started to become more user friendly, with touch screen and voice-activated interfaces.

Nevertheless, a great deal of effort often has to go into the adaptation of existing computer or mobile interfaces to make them easy to use in an educational context. The Web is just as much a prisoner of the general computer interface as any other software environment, and the educational potential of any Web site is also restricted by its algorithmic or tree-like structure. For instance, it does not always suit the inherent structure of some subject areas or the preferred way of learning of some students.

There are several consequences of these interface limitations for teachers and instructors:

• It is really important to choose teaching software or other technologies that are intuitively easy to use, both by the students in particular, but also for the teacher/instructor in creating materials and interacting with students.
• When creating materials for teaching, the teacher needs to be aware of the issues concerning navigation of the materials and screen layout and graphics. While it is possible to add stimulating features such as audio and animated graphics, this comes at the cost of bandwidth. Such features should be added only where they serve a useful educational function, as slow delivery of materials is extremely frustrating for learners, who will normally have slower internet access that the teacher creating the materials. Furthermore, web-based layout on desktop or laptop computers do not automatically transfer to the same dimensions or configurations on mobile devices and mobile devices have a wide range of standards, depending on the device. Given that the design of web-based materials requires a high level of specialized interface design skill, it is preferable to seek specialist help, especially if you want to use software or media that are not standard institutionally supported tools. This is particularly important when thinking of using new mobile apps, for instance.
• Third, we can expect in the next few years some significant changes in the general computer interface with the development of speech recognition technology, adaptive responses based on artificial intelligence, and the use of haptics (e.g. Hand-movement) to control devices. Changes in basic computer interface design could have as profound an impact on the use of technology in teaching as the internet has.

11.5. Reliability

The reliability and robustness of the technology are also critical. Most of us will have had the frustration of losing work when our word programming software crashes or working ‘in the cloud’ and being logged off in the middle of a piece of writing. The last thing you want as a teacher or instructor is lots of calls from students saying they cannot get online access, or that their computer keeps crashing. (If the software locks up one machine, it will probably lock up all the others!) Technical support can be a huge cost, not just in paying technical staff to deal with service calls, but also in lost time of students and teachers.

‘Innovation in teaching’ will certainly bring rewards these days as institutions jostle for position as innovative institutions. It is often easier to get funding for new uses of technology than funding to sustain older but successful technologies. Although podcasts combined with a learning management system can be a very low-cost but highly effective teaching medium if good design is used, they are not sexy. It will usually be easier to get support for much more costly and spectacular technologies such as xMOOCs or virtual reality.

On the other hand, there is much risk in being too early into new technology. The software may not be fully tested and reliable, or the company supporting the new technology may go out of business. Students are not guinea pigs, and reliable and sustainable service is more important to them than the glitz and glamour of untried technology. It is best to wait for at least a year for new apps or software to be fully tested in general applications before adopting them for teaching. It is wise then not to rush in and buy the latest software update or new product – wait for the bugs to be ironed out.  Also if you plan to use a new app or technology that is not generally supported by the institution, check first with IT services to ensure there are not security, privacy or institutional bandwidth issues. Thus it is better to be at the leading edge, just behind the first wave of innovation, rather than at the bleeding edge.

A feature of online learning is that peak use tends to fall outside normal office hours. Thus it is really important that your course materials sit on a reliable server with high-speed access and 24 hours, seven days week reliability, with automatic back-up on a separate, independent server located in a different building. Ideally, the servers should be in a secure area (with for instance emergency electricity supply) with 24-hour technical support, which probably means locating your servers with a central IT service or ‘in the cloud’, which means it is all the more important to ensure that materials are safely and independently backed up.

However, the good news is that most commercial educational software products such as learning management systems and lecture capture, as well as servers, are very reliable. Open-source software to is usually reliable but probably slightly more at risk of technical failure or security breaches. If you have good IT support, you should receive very few calls from students on technical matters. The main technical issue that faculty face these days appears to be software up-grades to learning management systems. This often means moving course materials from one version of the software to the new version. This can be costly and time-consuming, particularly if the new version is substantially different from the previous version. Overall, though, reliability should not be an issue.

In summary, ease of use requires professionally designed commercial or open-source course software, specialized help in graphics, navigation and screen design for your course materials, and strong technical support for server and software management and maintenance. Certainly in North America, most institutions now provide IT and other services focused specifically on supporting technology-based teaching. However, without such professional support, a great deal of your time as a teacher will be spent on technical issues, and to be blunt, if you do not have easy and convenient access to such support, you would be wise not to get heavily committed to technology-based teaching until that support is available. 

11.6. Questions for Consideration

Ease of use is another critical factor in the successful use of technology for teaching. Some of the questions then that you need to consider are:

1. How intuitively easy to use, both by students and by yourself, is the technology you are considering?
2. How reliable is the technology?
3. How easy is it to maintain and upgrade the technology?
4. The company that is providing the critical hardware or software you are using: is it a stable company that is not likely to go out of business in the next year or two, or is it a new start-up? What strategies are in place to secure any digital teaching materials you create should the organisation providing the software or service ceases to exist?
5. Do you have adequate technical and professional support, both in terms of technology and with respect to the design of materials?
6. How fast developing is this subject area? How important is it to regularly change the teaching materials? Which technology will best support this?
7. To what extent can the changes be handed over to someone else to do, and/or how essential is it for you to do them yourself?

12. Cost

12.1. A Revolution in Media

Until as recently as ten years ago, cost was a major discriminator affecting the choice of technology (Hülsmann, 2000, 2003; Rumble, 2001; Bates, 2005). For instance, for educational purposes, audio (lectures, radio, audio-cassettes) was far cheaper than print, which in turn was far cheaper than most forms of computer-based learning, which in turn was far cheaper than video (television, cassettes or video-conferencing). All these media were usually seen as either added costs to regular teaching, or too expensive to use to replace face-to-face teaching, except for purely distance education on a fairly large scale.

However, there have been dramatic reductions in the cost of developing and distributing all kinds of media (except face-to-face teaching) in the last ten years, due to several factors:

• Rapid developments in consumer technologies such as smartphones that enable text, audio, and video to be both created and transmitted by end-users at a low cost.
• Compression of digital media, enabling even high bandwidth video or television to be carried over wireless, landlines and the internet at an economic cost (at least in economically advanced countries).
• Improvements in media software, making it relatively easy for non-professional users to create and distribute all kinds of media.
• Increasing amounts of media-based open educational resources, which are already developed learning materials that are free for teachers and students alike to use.

The good news then is that in general, and in principle, cost should no longer be an automatic discriminator in the choice of media. If you are happy to accept this statement at face value than you can skip the rest of this lesson. Choose the mix of media that best meets your teaching needs, and don’t worry about which medium is likely to cost more. Indeed, a good case could be made that it would now be cheaper to replace face-to-face teaching with purely online learning if the cost was the only consideration.

In practice, however, costs can vary enormously both between and within media, depending once again on context and design. Since the main cost from a teacher’s perspective is their time, it is important to know what are the ‘drivers’ of cost, that is, what factors are associated with increased costs, depending on the context and the medium being used. These factors are less influenced by new technological developments, and can, therefore, be seen as ‘foundational’ principles when considering the costs of educational media.

Unfortunately, there are many different factors that can influence the actual cost of using media in education, which makes a detailed discussion of costs very complex (for a more detailed treatment, see Bates and Sangrà, 2011). As a result, I will try to identify the main cost drivers, then provide a table that provides a simplified guide to how these factors influence the costs of different media, including face-to-face teaching. This guide again should be considered as a heuristic device, so see this section as Media Costs 101.

12.2. Cost Categories

The main cost categories to be considered in using educational media and technologies, and especially blended or online learning, is as follows:

These are the costs needed to pull together or create learning materials using particular media or technologies. There are several sub-categories of development costs:

• Production costs: making a video or building a course section in a learning management system, or creating a virtual world. Included in these costs will be the time of specialist staff, such as web designers or media or computer specialists, as well as any costs in web design or video production.
• Your time as an instructor: the work you have to do as part of developing or producing materials. This will include planning/course design as well as development. Your time is money, and probably the largest single cost in using educational technologies, but more importantly, if you are developing learning materials you are not doing other things, such as research or interacting with students, so there is a real cost, even if it is not expressed in dollar terms.
• Copyright clearance if you are using third party materials such as photos or video clips. Again, this is more likely to be thought of as time in finding and clearing copyright more than money.
• Probably the cost of an instructional designer in terms of their time.

Development costs are usually fixed or ‘once only’ and are independent of the number of students. Once media are developed, they are usually scalable, in that once produced, they can be used by any number of learners without increased development costs. Using open educational resources can greatly reduce media development costs.

Delivery

This includes the cost of the educational activities needed during offering the course and would include instructional time spent interacting with students, instructional time spent on marking assignments, and would include the time of other staff supporting delivery, such as teaching assistants, adjuncts for additional sections and instructional designers and technical support staff.

Because of the cost of human factors such as instructional time and technical support needed in media-based teaching, delivery costs tend to increase as student numbers increase, and also have to be repeated each time the course is on offer. In other words, they are recurrent. However, increasingly with Internet-based delivery, there is usually a zero direct technology cost in delivery.

Once materials for a course are created, they need to be maintained. URLs go dead, set readings may go out of print or expire, and more importantly, new developments in the subject area may need to be accommodated. Thus once a course is offered, there are ongoing maintenance costs.

Instructional designers and/or media professionals can manage some of the maintenance, but nevertheless teachers or instructors will need to be involved with decisions about content replacement or updating. Maintenance is not usually a major time consumer for a single course, but if an instructor is involved in the design and production of several online courses, maintenance time can build to a significant amount.

Maintenance costs are usually independent of the number of students, but are dependent on the number of courses an instructor is responsible for, and are recurrent each year.

These include infrastructure or overhead costs, such as the cost of licensing a learning management system, lecture capture technology and servers for video streaming. These are real costs but not ones that can be allocated to a single course but will be shared across a number of courses. Overheads are usually considered to be institutional costs and, although important, probably will not influence a teacher’s decision about which media to use, provided these services are already in place and the institution does not directly charge for such services.

However, if a new online program is to be offered on a full cost-recovery basis, then other institutional overheads will also need to be added. Some will be the same as for on-campus courses (for example, a contribution towards the President’s Office), but other overheads applied to on-campus students, such as building maintenance, will not apply to a fully online program (which is the main reason that the net cost of an online program is usually less than that of a campus-based program).

12.3. Cost Drivers

The primary factors that drive cost are:

• The development/production of materials
• The delivery of materials
• Number of students/scalability
• The experience of an instructor working with the medium
• Whether the instructor develops materials alone (self-development) or works with professionals

Production of technology-based materials such as a video program, or a Web site, is a fixed cost, in that it is not influenced by how many students take the course. However, production costs can vary depending on the design of the course. Engle (2014) showed that depending on the method of video production, the development costs for a MOOC could vary by a factor of six (the most expensive production method – full studio production – being six times that of an instructor self-recording on a laptop).

Nevertheless, once produced, the cost is independent of the number of students. Thus the more expensive the course to develop, the greater the need to increase student numbers to reduce the average cost per student. (Or put another way, the greater the number of students, the more reason to ensure that high-quality production is used, whatever the medium). In the case of MOOCs (which tend to be almost twice as expensive to develop as an online course for credit using a learning management system – University of Ottawa, 2013) the number of learners is so great that the average cost per student is very small. Thus there are opportunities for economies of scale from the development of digital material, provided that student course enrolments can be increased (which may not always be the case). This can be described as the potential for the scalability of a medium.

Similarly, there are costs in teaching the course once the course is developed. These tend to be variable costs, in that they increase as class size increases. If student-teacher interaction, through online discussion forums and assignment marking, is to be kept to a manageable level, then the teacher-student ratio needs to be kept relatively low (for instance, between 1:25 to 1:40, depending on the subject area and the level of the course). The more students, the more time a teacher will need to spend on delivery, or additional contract instructors will need to be hired. Either way, increased student numbers generally will lead to increased costs. MOOCs are an exception. Their main value proposition is that they do not provide direct learner support, so they have zero delivery costs. However, this is probably the reason why such a small proportion of participants successfully complete MOOCs.

There may be benefits than for a teacher or for an institution in spending more money upfront for interactive learning materials if this leads to less demand for teacher-student interaction. For instance, a mathematics course might be able to use automated testing and feedback and simulations and diagrams, and pre-designed answers to frequently asked questions, with less or even no time spent on individual assignment marking or communication with the teacher. In this case, it may be possible to manage teacher-student ratios as high as 1:200 or more, without significant loss of quality.

Also, experience in using or working with a particular medium or delivery method is also important. The first time an instructor uses a particular medium such as podcasting, it takes much longer than subsequent productions or offerings. Some media or technologies though need much more effort to learn to use than others. Thus a related cost driver is whether the instructor works alone (self-development) or works with media professionals. Self-developing materials will usually take longer for an instructor than working with professionals.

There are advantages in teachers and instructors working with media professionals when developing digital media. Media professionals will ensure the development of a quality product, and above all can save teachers or instructors considerable time, for instance through the choice of appropriate software, editing, and storage and streaming of digital materials. Instructional designers can help in suggesting appropriate applications of different media for different learning outcomes. Thus as with all educational design, a team approach is likely to be more effective, and working with other professionals will help control the time teachers and instructors spend on media development.

Lastly, design decisions are critical. Costs are driven by design decisions within a medium. For instance, cost drivers are different between lectures and seminars (or lab classes) in face-to-face teaching. Similarly, video can be used just to record talking heads, as in lecture capture, or can be used to exploit the affordances of the medium, such as demonstrating processes or location shooting. Computing has a wide and increasing range of possible designs, including online collaborative learning (OCL), computer-based learning, animations, simulations, or virtual worlds.

Figure 29 attempts to capture the complexity of cost factors, focusing mainly on the perspective of a teacher or instructor making decisions. Again, this should be seen as a heuristic device, a way of thinking about the issue. Other factors could be added (such as social media, or maintenance of materials). I have given my own personal ratings for each cell, based on my experience. I have taken conventional teaching as a medium or ‘average’ cost, then ranked cells as to whether there is a higher or lower cost factor for the particular medium. Other readers may well rate the cells differently.

Although the time it takes to develop and deliver learning using different technologies is likely to influence an instructor’s decision about what technology to use, it is not a simple equation. For instance, developing a good quality online course using a mix of video and text materials may take much more of the instructor’s time to prepare than if the course was offered through classroom teaching. However, the online course may take less time in delivery over several years, because students may be spending more time on task online, and less time in direct interaction with the instructor. Once again, we see that design is a critical factor in how costs are assessed.

In short, from an instructor perspective, time is the critical cost factor. Technologies that take a lot of time to use are less likely to be used than those that are easy to use and thus save time. But once again design decisions can greatly affect how much time teachers or instructors need to spend on any medium, and the ability of teachers and students to create their own educational media is becoming an increasingly important factor.

12.4. Issues for Consideration

Lecture Capture vs LMS: Cost Factors

In recent years, university faculty have generally gravitated more to lecture capture and video streaming for online course delivery, particularly in institutions where online or distance learning is relatively new because it is ‘simpler’ to do than redesign and create mainly text-based materials in learning management systems. Lecture capture also more closely resembles the traditional classroom method, so less change is required of the instructor.

Pedagogically though (depending on the subject area) lecture capture may be less effective than an online course using collaborative learning and online discussion forums. Also, from an institutional perspective lecture capture has a much higher technology cost than a learning management system. And, of course, lecture capture is often used in conjunction with an LMS. What different technologies tend to do though is change the spread of an instructor's time between development and delivery. Media such as an LMS can have higher initial development costs but much lower annual delivery and maintenance costs than face-to-face teaching, for instance.

Also, students themselves can now use their own devices to create multimedia materials for project work or for assessment purposes in the form of e-portfolios. Media allow instructors, if they wish, to move a lot of the hard work in teaching and learning from themselves to the students. Media allow students to spend more time on task, and low cost, consumer media such as mobile phones or tablets enable students themselves to create media artifacts, enabling them to demonstrate their learning in concrete ways. This does not mean that instructor ‘presence’ is no longer needed when students are studying online, but it does enable a shift in where and how a teacher or instructor can spend their time in supporting learning.

Cost is a critical factor influencing media choice. For instructors, the main cost will be their time. However it is important to look at time over the length of a course over several years, not just in the initial production or preparation of materials. Carefully produced media may take more time in production, but can save a great deal of time in delivery, especially if student activities and automated feedback can be built into the design. This is why some institutions have a special fund for innovative teaching or technology-based teaching and learning, to free up instructor time for design and development.

Media also differ considerably in the balance of costs between development, delivery, maintenance and overheads. Face-to-face teaching has minimal development costs, but heavy delivery costs in terms of instructor time; an LMS-based online course is has more of an equal balance between development and delivery costs. Serious games usually have high development costs but very low delivery costs.

Whatever the balance, cost is still a critical factor in media choice.

13. Teaching and Media Selection

13.1. The Importance of Design in Multimedia Teaching

This lesson discusses the various pedagogical differences between media. Identifying appropriate uses of media is both an increasingly important requirement of teachers and instructors in a digital age and a very complex challenge. This is one reason for working closely with instructional designers and media professionals whenever possible. Teachers working with instructional designers will need to decide which media they intend to use on pedagogical as well as operational grounds.

However, once the choice of media has been made, by focusing on design issues we can provide further guidelines for making appropriate use of media. In particular, having gone through the process of identifying possible teaching roles or functions for different media, we can then draw on the work of Mayer (2012) and Koumi (2006, 2015) to ensure that whatever choice or a mix of media we have decided on, the design leads to effective teaching.

Mayer’s research focused heavily on cognitive overload in rich, multimedia teaching. From all his research over many years, Mayer identified 12 principles of multimedia design, based on how learners cognitively process multimedia:

People learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included. Basically, keep it simple in media terms.

People learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added. This replicates earlier findings by Bates and Gallagher (1977). Students need to know what to look for in multimedia materials.

People learn better from graphics + narration, than from graphics, narration and on-screen text.

People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

People learn better when a multimedia lesson is presented in user-paced segments rather than as a continuous lesson. Thus several ‘YouTube’ length videos are more likely to work better than a 50-minute video.

People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and the characteristics of the main concepts. This suggests a design feature for flipped classrooms, for instance. It may be better to use a lecture or readings that provide a summary of key concepts and principles before showing more detailed examples or applications of such principles in a video.

People learn better from graphics and narration than from animation and on-screen text. This reflects the importance of learners being able to combine both hearing and viewing at the same time to reinforce each other in specific ways.

People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. This also reinforces what I wrote in 1995: Make all four media available to teachers and learners (Bates, 1995, p.13).

People learn better from multimedia lessons when words are in conversational style rather than formal style. I would go even further than Mayer here. Multimedia can enable learners (particularly distance learners) to relate to the instructor, as suggested by Durbridge’s research (1983, 1984) on audio combined with text. Providing a ‘human voice and face’ to the teaching helps motivate learners, and makes multimedia teaching feel that it is directed solely at the individual learner, if a conversational style is adopted.

People learn better when the narration in multimedia lessons is spoken in a friendly human voice rather than a machine voice. 

People do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.

In re-reading Mayer’s work, I am struck by the similarities in findings, using different research methods, different multimedia technologies, and different contexts, to the research from the Audio-Visual Media Research Group at the British Open University in the 1970s and 1980s (Bates, 1984).

More recently, the University of British Columbia has done an excellent job of suggesting how Mayer’s design principles could be operationalized. Staff at the University of British Columbia have combined Mayer’s findings with Robert Talbert’s experience from developing a series of successful screencasts on mathematics, into a set of practical design guidelines for multimedia production.

Talbert’s key design principles are:

• Keep it Simple: focus on one idea at a time.
• Keep it Short: keep videos to a length of 5-6 minutes max. To maximize attention.
• Keep it Real: model the decision making and problem-solving processes of expert learners.
• Keep it Good: be intentional about planning the video; strive to produce the best video and audio quality possible.

Thus design decisions are critical in influencing the effectiveness of a particular technology. Well-designed lectures will teach better than a poorly designed online course, and vice versa.

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.

13.3. Questions for Consideration

Therefore, it is not enough to focus just on the design of multimedia materials, as important as design is, even considering just the pedagogical context. The choice and use of media need to be related to other factors (what Mayer calls ‘boundary conditions’), such as individual differences between learners, the complexity of the content, and the desired learning outcomes. Thus when considering media from a strictly teaching perspective, the following questions need to be considered:

1. Who are my students?
2. What content needs to be covered?
3. What are the desired learning outcomes from teaching in terms of skills development?
4. What instructional strategies or approaches to learning do I plan using?
5. What are the unique pedagogical characteristics of different media? How might different media help with the presentation of content and development of student skills in this course?
6. What is the best way to present the content to be covered in this course? How can media help with the presentation of content? Which media for what content?
7. What skills am I trying to develop this course? How can media help students with the development of the requisite skills for this course? Which media for which skills?
8. What principles do I need to use when designing multimedia materials for their most effective use?

Working through these questions are likely to be an iterative rather than a sequential process. Depending on the way you prefer to think about and make decisions, it may help to write down the answers to each of the questions, but going through the process of thinking about these questions is probably more important, leaving you with the freedom to make choices on a more intuitive basis, having first taken all these – and other – factors into consideration.

14. Interaction

The fifth element of the SECTIONS model for selecting media is interaction. How do different media enable interaction? The extent to which a medium enables interaction – and the kind of interaction –  is critically important, as there is now an overwhelming amount of research evidence to suggest that students learn best when they are ‘active’ in their learning. But what does this mean? And what role can or do new technologies play in supporting active learning?

14.1. Types of Learner Interaction

There are three different ways learners can interact when studying (Moore, 1989), and each of these ways requires a somewhat different mix of media and technology.

This is the interaction generated when students work on a particular medium, such as a printed textbook, a learning management system, or a short video clip, without direct intervention from an instructor or other students. This interaction can be ‘reflective’, without any overt actions, or it can be ‘observable’, in the form of the assessed response, such as a multiple-choice test, or as notes to assist memory and comprehension.

Computer technology can greatly facilitate learners’ interaction with learning resources. Self-administered online tests can provide feedback to students on their comprehension or coverage of a subject area. Such tests can also provide feedback to teachers on topic areas where students are having difficulty, and can also be used for grading of students on their comprehension. Using standard test software built into learning management systems, students can be automatically assessed and graded on their comprehension of course materials. More advanced activities might include composing music using software that converts musical notation to audio, entering data to test concepts through online simulations, or participating in games or decision-making scenarios controlled by the computer. Thus computer-managed learner interaction is particularly good for developing comprehension and understanding of concepts and procedures, but it has limitations in developing the higher-order learning skills of analysis, synthesis and critical thinking, without additional human intervention of some kind.

There are other ways besides computer-managed learning to facilitate interaction between learners and learning material. Textbooks may include activities set by the author (as in this textbook), or instructors can set student activities around set readings. Other student activities might include reading text or watching videos embedded in a learning management system, conducting a structured approach to finding and analyzing web-based materials, or downloading and editing information from the web to create e-portfolios of work. These activities may or may not be assessed, although evidence suggests that students, and in particular students studying online, tend to focus more assessed activities.

In other words, with good design and adequate resources, technology-based instruction can provide high levels of student interaction with the learning materials. There are strong economic advantages in exploiting the possibilities of learners’ interaction with learning materials because intense student-interaction with learning resources increases the time students spend on learning (‘time-on-task’), which tends to lead to increased learning (see Means et al., 2010). Perhaps more importantly, such activity, when well designed, can reduce the time the teacher needs to spend on interacting with each student.

Interaction between Students and Teacher

Student-teacher interaction is often needed though in order to develop many of the higher-order learning outcomes, such as analysis, synthesis, and critical thinking. This is particularly important for developing academic learning, where students are challenged to question ideas and to acquire deep understanding. This often requires dialogue and conversation, either one-on-one between instructor and students or between an instructor and a group of students. The role of the teacher in for instance either face-to-face seminars or online collaborative learning is therefore critical.

Some technologies, such as online discussion forums, enable or encourage such dialogue or discourse between students and instructors at a distance. The main limitation of student-teacher interaction is that it can be time-demanding for the teacher, and therefore does not scale easily.

Student - Student Interaction

High-quality student-student interaction can be provided equally well both in face-to-face and online learning contexts. Asynchronous online discussion forums built into learning management systems can enable this kind of interaction. Connectivist MOOCs and communities of practice also enable student-student interaction.

Again though quality depends on good design. Merely putting students together in a group, whether online or face-to-face is not likely to lead to either high levels of participation or high quality learning without careful thought being given to the educational goals of discussion within a course, the topics for discussion and their relationship to assessment and learning outcomes, and without strong preparation of the students by the instructor for self-directed discussions.

In a technologically rich learning environment, then, a key decision for a teacher or course designer is choosing the best mix of these three different kinds of interaction, taking into consideration the epistemological approach, the amount of time available for both students and instructor, and the desired learning outcomes. Technology can enable all three kinds of interaction.

14.2. The Interactive Characteristics of Media and Technologies

Different technologies can enhance or inhibit each of the three types of interactivity outlined above. This again means looking at the dimension of interactivity as it applies to different media and technology. This dimension has three components or points on the dimension in terms of the extent an active response from a user is required when a medium or technology is used for teaching.

Some media are inherently ‘active’ in that they ‘push’ learners to respond. An example is adaptive learning, where students cannot progress to the next stage of learning without interacting through a test that ascertains whether they have learned sufficiently to progress to the next stage, or what ‘corrective’ learning they still need to do. Behaviourist computer-based learning is inherently interactive, as it forces learners to respond. Technologies that control how a learner responds are often associated with more behaviourist approaches to teaching and learning.

Although some media or technologies are not inherently interactive, they can be explicitly designed to encourage interaction with learners. For instance, although a web page is not inherently interactive, it can be designed to be interactive, by adding a comment box or by requiring users to enter information or make choices. In particular, teachers or instructors can add or suggest activities within a particular medium. A podcast can be designed so that students stop the podcast every few minutes to do an activity based on the content of the podcast. This approach can be applied just as much to textbooks, where activities can be included, as to web pages.

In many cases, though, a medium will require the intervention of a teacher or instructor both to set activities around the learning materials and to provide appropriate feedback, thus adding to rather than reducing the workload of instructors. Thus where instructors have to intervene either to design activities or to provide feedback, the cost or time demands on the instructor are likely to be greater than if the other two kinds of interaction are used.

Some media may not have explicit interaction built-in, but end users may still voluntarily interact with the medium, either cognitively and/or through some physical response. For instance someone in an art gallery may cognitively or emotionally respond to a particular painting (while others may just glance at it or pass it by). Students may choose to make sketches or drawings from the painting. Learners may respond in similar ways to reading a novel or poem.

The creators of the work may in fact deliberately design the work to encourage reflection or analysis, but not inexplicit ways, leaving the interpretation of a work to the viewer or reader. (This of course is a constructivist approach to learning.) Media that encourage learners independently to be active without the necessary intervention of a teacher or instructor also has cost advantages, although the quality of the interaction will be more difficult to monitor or assess.

Thus one dimension of interactivity is control: to what extent is interaction controlled or enabled by the technology, by the creators/instructors, or by the users/learners? It can be seen that this is a complex dimension, once again influenced by epistemological positions, and also by design decisions on the teacher’s part. These categories of interactivity are in no way ‘fixed’, with different levels or types of interaction possible within the same medium or technology. In the end, interaction needs to be linked to the desired learning outcomes. What kind of interaction will best lead to a particular type of learning outcome, and what technology or medium best provides this kind of interaction?

14.3. Interaction and Feedback

Feedback is an important aspect of interaction, and timely and appropriate feedback on learner activities is often essential for effective learning. In particular, to what extent is feedback possible within a particular medium? Although for instance, a learner may respond actively to a poem in a book, feedback on that interaction is usually not available just from the reading. Some other medium will need to be used to provide that feedback, such as a face-to-face poetry class or an online discussion forum.

On the other hand, with computer-based learning, once a student has responded to a multiple-choice question, the computer can mark the question and give almost instant feedback. However, with some technologies such as print, providing appropriate or immediate feedback to learners on their activities may be difficult or impossible. Although ‘model’ or ‘correct’ answers might be provided in a text on another page, quality feedback on activities must be provided by a teacher or instructor when using a printed medium.

Thus media and technologies again differ in their capacity to provide various kinds of feedback. From a teaching perspective, it is important to be clear about what kind of feedback is likely to be most effective, and then the most effective way to provide that feedback. In particular, under what circumstances is it appropriate to automate feedback, and when should feedback be provided by a teacher/instructor, or perhaps a teaching assistant, or even by other students?

14.4. Analysing the Interactive Qualities of Different Media

In Figure 34, I have analyzed the interactive qualities of different educational media along with two different dimensions: different types of student interaction; and characteristics of the medium, in terms of whether the interaction is built into the medium, or needs to be added through deliberate design, or whether it is left to the learner to decide how to interact.

I have allocated a number of different media here according to the type of learner activity they help generate. The actual location though of some of these media will be dependent on design decisions made by the instructor. For instance, a podcast could be accompanied by an activity (designed), or just be a straight broadcast, with the student left to interpret its meaning and purpose in the course (learner-generated).  In some cases, an activity may be triggered by one medium (such as a podcast) but the actual activity and the feedback may take place in another medium (such as through an online assessment).

14.5. Questions for Consideration

Thus it can be seen that media and technology is somewhat slippery when it comes to categorizing them in terms of interaction, because instructors and learners often have a choice in how the medium will actually be used, and that will affect how learner interaction and feedback takes place within a single medium. Thus once again the quality of the design of the interactive experiences is as important as the medium of choice for enabling the activity, although an inappropriate choice of technology can reduce the level of activity and/or the quality of the interactions. In reality, teachers and learners are likely to use a combination of media and technologies to ensure high-quality interactivity. However, using a number of different media is likely to increase cost and the workload for both instructors and learners.

Once again, there is no evaluative judgment on my part in terms of which media or characteristics provide the ‘best’ interactivity. The choice of the medium should depend on the kind of activities that are judged important by a teacher or instructor within the overall context of the teaching. The purpose of this analysis is to sensitize you to the differences between educational media in generating or facilitating different types of interactivity so that you can make informed decisions. In this case, though, there are no clear media or technology ‘winners’ in terms of interactivity. Design decisions are likely to be more important than a technology choice. Nevertheless, technology can enable students separated from their instructors still to get quality activities and feedback, and when appropriately used, the technology used to support activities can result in more time on task for students.

1. In terms of the skills, I am trying to develop, what kinds of interaction will be most useful? What media or technology could I use to facilitate that kind of interaction?
2. In terms of the effective use of my time, what kinds of interaction will produce a good balance between on the one hand student comprehension and student skills development, and on the other the amount of time I will be interacting personally or online with students?

15. Organisational Issues

15.1. Institutional Readiness for Teaching with Technology

One of the critical issues that will influence the selection of media by teachers and instructors is:

• The way the institution structures teaching activities.
• The instructional and technology services already in place.
• The support for media and technology use that their institution provides.

If an institution is organised around a set number of classroom periods every day, and the use of physical classrooms, the teachers are likely to focus mainly on classroom delivery.

The reverse is equally true. If the school or university does not support a particular technology, teachers and instructors quite understandably won’t use it. Even if the technology is in place, such as a learning management system or a video production facility, if instructors are not trained or oriented to its use and potential, then it will either be under used or not used at all. Furthermore, if ‘core’ technologies’ such as learning management systems or lecture capture facilities are not properly managed or if the services are understaffed, teachers and instructors lose patience and confidence in the technology.

Because of the inertia in institutions, there is often a bias towards those technologies that can be introduced with the minimum of organisational change, although these may not be the technologies that would have maximum impact on learning. These organisational challenges are extremely difficult and are often major reasons for the slow implementation of new technologies for teaching in education (see Marshall, 2009) for a method for assessing the readiness of institutions for online learning).

Most institutions that have successfully introduced media and technology for teaching on a large scale have recognized the need for adequate professional support for faculty, by providing instructional designers, media designers and IT support staff to support teaching and learning. Some institutions also provide funding for innovative teaching projects. 

15.2. Work with Professionals

Even those experienced in using media for teaching and learning would be wise to work with instructional designers and professional media producers when creating any of the media discussed in this lesson  (with the possible exception of social media). It is important for the choice of technology to be driven by educational goals, rather than starting with a particular medium or technology in mind.

There are several reasons for working with professionals:

• They understand the technology and as a result, will enable you to develop a better product more quickly than working alone.
• Two heads are better than one: working collaboratively will result in new and better ideas about how you could be using the medium.
• Instructional designers and professional media producers will usually be familiar with project management and budgeting for media production, enabling resources to be developed in time and on budget. This is important as it is easy for teachers or instructors to get sucked into spending far more time than necessary on producing media.

The key point here is that although it is now possible for teachers and instructors to produce reasonably good quality audio and video on their own, they will always benefit from the input of professionals in media production.

15.3. Questions for Consideration

1. How much and what kind of help can I get from the institution in choosing and using media for teaching? Is help easily accessible? How good is the help? Do the support people have the media professionalism I will need? Are they up to date in the use of new technologies for teaching?
2. Is there possible funding available to ‘buy me out’ for a semester and/or to fund a teaching assistant so I can concentrate on designing a new course or revising an existing course? Is there funding for media production?
3. To what extent will I have to follow ‘standard’ technologies, practices and procedures, such as using a learning management system, or lecture capture system, or will I be encouraged and supported to try something new?
4. Are there already suitable media resources freely available that I can use in my teaching, rather than creating everything from scratch? Can I get help from the library for instance in identifying these resources and dealing with any copyright issues?

If the answers are negative for each of these questions, you would be wise to set very modest goals initially for using media and technology.

Nevertheless, the good news is that it is increasingly easy to create and manage your own media such as web sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and simple video production using a desktop computer or even a mobile phone. Furthermore, students themselves are often capable and interested in participating or helping with creating learning resources, if given the chance. Getting students involved in media production is a very good way for them to get a deeper understanding of a subject. Above all, there is an increasing amount of really good educational media coming available for free use for educational purposes, so it is not necessary always to create media from scratch.

16. Networking (and Novelty)

16.1. Networking and Novelty in Course Design

In earlier versions of the SECTIONS model, ‘N’ stood for novelty. This was to recognize the importance of teachers and instructors trying something new to improve on their practice, in this case, to try new technology and see how well it worked for them. Also, the ‘hype’ surrounding new developments in technology often provides a supportive environment for innovative teaching. This is still an important issue; without experiment and trying new ways of teaching and new technologies for teaching, there will be no improvement in practice.

However, more recent developments in social media raise another, increasingly important, question that needs to be asked when selecting media:

If the answer to this is an affirmative, then this will affect what media to use, and in particular, will suggest the use of social media such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google Hangout.

Five different ways social media are influencing the application of networking in course design are described below.

16.2. Supplementing 'Standard' Learning Technologies

Some instructors are combining social media for external networking with ‘standard’ institutional technologies such as a learning management system or video delivery. The LMS, which is password protected and available only to the instructor and other enrolled students allow for ‘safe’ communication within the course. The use of social media allows for connections with the external world (contributions can still be screened by the course blog or wiki administrator by monitoring and approving contributions.)

For instance, a course on Middle Eastern politics could have an internal discussion forum focused on relating current events directly to the themes and issues that are the focus of the course, but students may manage their own, public wiki that encourages contributions from Middle East scholars and students, and indeed anyone from the general public. Comments may end up being moved into and out of the more closed class discussion forum as a result.

16.3. Exclusive Use of Social Media for Credit Courses

Other instructors are moving altogether away from ‘standard’ institutional technology such as learning management systems and lecture capture into the use of social media for managing the whole course. For instance, UBC’s course ETEC 522 uses WordPress, YouTube videos and podcasts for instructor and student contributions to the course. Indeed the choice of social media on this course changes every year, depending on the focus of the course, and new developments in social media. Jon Beasley-Murray at the University of British Columbia built a whole course around students creating a high level (featured-article) Wikipedia entry on Latin American literature (Latin American literature WikiProject – see Beasley-Murray, 2008).

16.4. Student Generated Learning Resources

This is a particularly interesting development where students themselves use social media to create resources to help other students. For instance, graduate math students at UBC have created the Math Exam/Education Resources wiki, which provides ‘past exams with fully worked-out and reviewed solutions, video lectures & pencasts by topic‘. Such sites are open to anyone needing help in their studying, not just UBC students. The project involves voluntary collaboration between graduate students for the benefit of undergraduate students.

16.5. Self - Managed Learning Groups

cMOOCs are an obvious example of self-managed learning groups using social media such as webinars, blogs and wikis.

16.6. Instructor - Led Open Educational Resources

YouTube in particular is becoming increasingly popular for instructors to use their knowledge to create resources available to anyone. The best example is still the Khan Academy, but there are many other examples, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare. xMOOCs are another example.

Once again, the decision to ‘open up’ teaching is as much a philosophical or value decision as a technology decision, but the technology is now there to encourage and enable this philosophy.

16.7. Questions for Consideration

1. How important is it to enable learners to network beyond a course, with others such as subject specialists, professionals in the field, and relevant people in the community? Can the course, or student learning, benefit from such external connections?
2. If this is important, what’s the best way to do this? Use social media exclusively? Integrate it with other standard course technology? Delegate responsibility for its design and/or administration to students or learners?

17. Security and Privacy

‘S’ too is a change from the earlier ACTIONS model, where ‘S’ stood for speed, in terms of how quickly a technology-enabled a course to be developed. However, the issues previously raised under-speed have also been included in SECTIONS ‘Ease of Use’. This allows ‘Speed’ to be replaced with ‘Security and privacy’, issues which have become increasingly important for education in a digital age.

17.1. The Need for Privacy and Security When Teaching

Teachers, instructors and students need a private place to work online. Instructors want to be able to criticize politicians or corporations without fear of reprisal; students may want to keep rash or radical comments from going public or will want to try out perhaps controversial ideas without having them spread all over Facebook. Institutions want to protect students from personal data collection for commercial purposes by private companies, tracking of their online learning activities by government agencies, or marketing and other unrequested commercial or political interruption to their studies. In particular, institutions want to protect students, as far as possible, from online harassment or bullying. Creating a strictly controlled environment enables institutions to manage privacy and security more effectively.

Learning management systems provide password-protected access to registered students and authorized instructors. Learning management systems were originally housed on servers managed by the institution itself. Password protected LMSs on secure servers have provided that protection. Institutional policies regarding appropriate online behaviour can be managed more easily if the communications are managed ‘in-house.’

17.2. Cloud - Based Services and Privacy

However, in recent years, more and more online services have moved ‘to the cloud’, hosted on massive servers whose physical location is often unknown even to the institution’s IT services department. Contract agreements between an educational institution and the cloud service providers are meant to ensure security and back-ups.

Nevertheless, Canadian institutions and privacy commissioners have been particularly wary of data being hosted out of the country, where it may be accessed through the laws of another country. There has been concern that Canadian student information and communications held on cloud servers in the USA may be accessible via the U.S. Patriot Act. For instance, Klassen (2015) writes:

Social media companies are almost exclusively based in the United States, where the provisions of the Patriot Act apply no matter where the information originates. The Patriot Act allows the U.S. government to access social media content and personally-identifying information without the end-users’ knowledge or consent. The government of British Columbia, concerned with both the privacy and security of personal information enacted a stringent piece of legislation to protect the personal information of British Columbians. The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) mandates that no personally identifying information of British Columbians can be collected without their knowledge and consent, and that such information not be used for anything other than the purpose for which it was originally collected.

Concerns about student privacy have increased even more when it became known that countries were sharing intelligence information, so there remains a risk that even student data on Canadian-based servers may well be shared with foreign countries.

Perhaps of more concern though is that as instructors and students increasingly use social media, academic communication becomes public and ‘exposed’. Bishop (2011) discusses the risks to institutions in using Facebook:

• Privacy is different from security, in that security is primarily a technical, hence mainly an IT, issue. Privacy needs a different set of policies that involves a much wider range of stakeholders within an institution, and hence a different (and more complex) governance approach from security.
• Many institutions do not have a simple, transparent set of policies for privacy, but different policies set by different parts of the institution. This will inevitably lead to confusion and difficulties in compliance.
• There is a whole range of laws and regulations that aim to protect privacy; these cover not only students but also staff; privacy policy needs to be consistent across the institution and be compliant with such laws and regulations.
• Facebook’s current privacy policy (2011) leaves many institutions using Facebook at a high level of risk of infringing or violating privacy laws – merely writing some kind of disclaimer will in many cases not be sufficient to avoid  breaking the law.

The controversy at Dalhousie University where dental students used Facebook for violent sexist remarks about their fellow women students is an example of the risks endemic in the use of social media.

17.3. The Need for Balance

Although there may well be some areas of teaching and learning where it is essential to operate behind closed doors, such as in some areas of medicine or areas related to public security, or in discussion of sensitive political or moral issues, in general though there have been relatively few privacy or security problems when teachers and instructors have opened up their courses, have followed institutional privacy policies, and above all where students and instructors have used common sense and behaved ethically. Nevertheless, as teaching and learning becomes more open and public, the level of risk does increase.

17.4. Questions for Consideration

• What student information am I obliged to keep private and secure? What are my institution’s policies on this?
• What is the risk that by using a particular technology my institution’s policies concerning privacy could easily be breached? Who in my institution could advise me on this?
• What areas of teaching and learning, if any, need I keep behind closed doors, available only to students registered in my course? Which technologies will best allow me to do this?

18. Deciding

If you’ve worked your way you are probably feeling somewhat overwhelmed by all the factors to take into consideration when selecting media. It is a complex issue, but if you have read all the previous sections, you are already in a good position to make well-informed decisions. Let me explain.

18.1. Deductive vs Inductive Decision - Making

Many years ago, when I first developed the ACTIONS model, I was approached by a good friend who worked for a large international computer company. (This was so long ago that data were entered to computers using punched cards). We sat down over a cup of coffee, and he outlined his plan. Here’s how the conversation went.

Pierre: Tony. I’m very excited about your model. We could take it and apply it in every school and university in the world.

Tony: Really? Now how would you do that?

Pierre: Well, you have a set of questions that teachers have to ask for each of the criteria. There is probably a limited set of answers to these questions. You could either work out what those answers are or collect answers from a representative sample of teachers. You could then give scores to each technology depending on the answers they give. So when a teacher has to make a choice of technology, they would sit down, answer the questions, then depending on their answers, the computer would calculate the best choice of technology. Voilà!

Tony: I don’t think that’s going to work, Pierre.

Pierre: But why not?

Tony: I’m not sure, but I have a gut feeling about this.

Pierre: A gut feeling? My English is not so good. What do you mean by a gut feeling?

Tony: Pierre, your English is excellent. My response is not entirely logical, so let me try and think it through now, both for you and me, why I don’t think this will work. First, I’m not sure there is a limited number of possible answers to each question, but even if there is, it’s not going to work.

Pierre: Well, why not?

Tony: Because I’m not sure how a teacher would score their response to each question and in any case, there’s going to be interaction between the answers to the questions. It’s not the addition of each answer that will determine what technology they might use, but how those answers combine. From a computing point of view, there could be very many different combinations of answers, and I’m not sure what the significant combinations are likely to be with regard to choosing each technology.

Pierre: But we have very big and fast computers, and we can simplify the process through algorithms.

Tony: Yes, but you have to take into account the context in which teachers will make media selections. They are going to be making decisions about media all the time, in many different contexts. It’s just not practical to sit down at a computer, answer all the questions, then wait for the computer’s recommendation.

Pierre: But won’t you give this a try? We can work through all these problems.

Tony: Pierre, I really appreciate your suggestion, but my gut tells me this won’t work, and I really don’t want to waste your time or mine on this.

Pierre: Well, what are you going to tell teachers then? How will they make their decisions?

Tony: I will tell them to use their gut instinct, Pierre – when they have read and applied the ACTIONS model.

This really is a true story, although the actual words were spoken may have been different. The fact that we do have artificial intelligence these days that technically could do this hasn’t changed my mind, because what we have in this scenario is a conflict between deductive reasoning (Pierre) and inductive reasoning (Tony).

With deductive reasoning, you would do what Pierre suggests: start without any prior conceptions about which technology to use, answer each of the questions I posed at the end of each part of the SECTIONS model, then write down all the possible technologies that would fit the answers to each question, see what technology would best match each of the questions/criteria, and ‘score’ each technology on a recommended scale for each criterion. You would then try to find a way to add all those answers together, perhaps by using a very large matrix, and then end up with a decision about what technology to use.

A major problem though is that every teacher and every learning context is somewhat different each time a decision needs to be made. Experienced teachers, in particular, will bring a whole lot of knowledge with them  – ideas about effective teaching methods, knowledge of the students, the requirement of the content and the skills they are trying to develop at the moment of decision, and above all the context in which the medium will be used (home, classroom, etc.) – before they have to make a decision.

My solution is very different from Pierre’s. Mine is a more inductive approach to decision making. The main criterion for inductive logic is as follows:

As evidence accumulates, the degree to which the collection of true evidence statements comes to support a hypothesis, as measured by the logic, should tend to indicate that false hypotheses are probably false and that true hypothesis are probably true.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In terms of selecting media, you probably start with a number of possible technologies in mind at the beginning of the process (hypotheses – or your gut feeling). My suggested process is started with your gut feeling about which technologies you’re thinking of using, but keeping an open mind, then move through all the questions suggested in each of the SECTIONS criteria (that is, collecting evidence for or against your initial ‘gut feeling’.) You then start building more evidence to support or reject the use of a particular medium or technology. By the end of the process you have a ‘probabilistic’ view of what combinations of media will work best for you and why. This is not an exercise you would have to do in detail or even consciously every time. Once you have done it just a few times, the choice of medium or technology in each ‘new’ situation will be quicker and easier, because the brain stores all the previous information and you have a framework (the SECTIONS model) for organising new information as it arrives and integrating it with your previous knowledge.

Now you’ve read this lesson you already have a set of questions for consideration (I have listed them all together in Appendix 1 for easy reference). You are now in the same position as the king who asked the alchemist how to make gold. ‘It’s easy’, said the alchemist, ‘so long as you don’t think about elephants.’ Well, having read the lessons on media in full, you now have the elephants in your head. It will be difficult to ignore them. The brain is in fact a wonderful instrument for making intuitive or inductive decisions of this kind. The trick though is to have all this information somewhere in your head, so you can pull it all out when you need it. The brain does this very quickly. Your decisions won’t always be perfect, but they will be a lot better than if you hadn’t already thought about all these issues, and in life, rough but ready usually beats perfect but late.

18.2. Grounding Media Selection Within a Course Development Framework

Media selection does not happen in a vacuum. There are many other factors to consider when designing teaching. In particular, embedded within any decision about the use of technology in education and training will be assumptions about the learning process. We have already seen earlier in this book how different epistemological positions and theories of learning affect the design of teaching, and these influences will also determine a teacher’s or an instructor’s choice of appropriate media. Media selection is just one part of the course design process. It has to fit within the broader framework of course design.

In Figure 40 below, Hibbitts and Travin’s modification of the ADDIE model presents the following learning and technology development model that incorporates the various stages of course design:

The SECTIONS model is strategy that could be used for assessing the technology fit within this course development process. Whether you are using ADDIE or an agile design approach, then, media selection will be influenced by the other factors in course design, adding more information to be considered. This will all be mixed in with your knowledge of the subject area and its requirements, your beliefs and values about teaching and learning, and a lot of emotion as well.

All this further reinforces the inductive approach to decision making that I have suggested. Don’t underestimate the power of your brain – it’s far better than a computer for this kind of decision-making. But it’s important to have the necessary information, as far as possible. So if you skipped a part of this lesson or the previous lessons on media, you might want to go back over it!

19. Activity (Reflective Thinking, Note Taking and Discussion)

This activity is optional. It is presented to facilitate your reflective thinking on the issues. There are no feedback. We encourage you to discuss these with your colleague.

Using media to promote student activity

1. Go to YouTube and type in your subject area into the ‘search’ box.
2. Choose a YouTube video from the list that comes up that you might recommend to your students to watch.
3. What kind of interaction would the YouTube video require from your students? Does it force them to respond in some way (inherent)?
4. In what way are they likely to respond to the YouTube on their own, e.g. make notes, do an activity, think about the topic (learner-generated)?
5. What activity could you suggest that they do, after they have watched the YouTube video (designed)? What type of knowledge or skill would that activity help develop? What medium or technology would students use to do the activity?
6. How would students get feedback on the activity that you set? What medium or technology would they and/or you use for getting and giving feedback on their activity?
7. How much work for you would that activity cause? Would the work be both manageable and worthwhile? Could the activity be scaled for larger numbers of students?
8. How could the YouTube video have been designed to generate more or better activity from viewers or students?

20. Key Takeaways

The key takeaways from this lesson are: Technologies are merely tools that can be used in a variety of ways. What matters more is how technologies are applied. The same technology can be applied in different ways, even or especially in education. So in judging the value of a technology, we need to look more closely at the ways in which it is being or could be used. In essence this means focusing more on media – which represent the more holistic use of technologies – than on individual tools or technologies themselves, while still recognising that technology is an essential component of almost all media. There is a very wide range of media available for teaching and learning. In particular: text, audio, video, computing and social media all have unique characteristics that make them useful for teaching and learning. The choice or combination of media will need to be determined by: The overall teaching philosophy behind the teaching; The presentational and structural requirements of the subject matter or content; The skills that need to be developed in learners; and The imagination of the teacher or instructor (and increasingly learners themselves) in identifying possible roles for different media. Content is now increasingly open and freely available over the Internet; as a result learners can seek, use and apply information beyond the bounds of what a professor or teacher may dictate. The SECTIONS model provides a set of criteria or questions, the result of which can help inform an instructor when making decisions about which media or technologies to use.