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MENO: improving the design and use of interactive multimedia for education.
This three-year project, funded by the ESRC Cognitive Engineering Programme from 1995-1998, investigates the relationship between the design of educational interactive multimedia products and how people learn with them. We are studying interrelationships between the learning tasks, the narrative (or macro-structure), the classroom context, and the users (interpreting users as teachers and students).
Narrative has been a means of structuring texts for centuries. Ever since Aristotle, we have learnt that stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end - in other words, a linear construction. But narrative doesn?t only apply to fiction: the television news is presented as stories, documentary programmes frequently use narrative as a framing device, and we recount our daily life to others in story form. We use narrative to shape experience and to help us remember. Interactive communication between people is even older, but the concept of interactivity has only recently been applied to the design of media. Users can change direction, vary the pace, repeat sequences and input responses, so the narrative can be suspended and altered and may thwart or confuse our expectations. But although multimedia superficially appears to combine media with which we are already familiar, such as film, television, and books, the ?reading? or interpreting skills we have acquired from exposure to these traditional media are not directly transferable. Can we apply what we know about the relationships between narrative and learning in linear media to the design of interactive media?
We started by taking a naturalistic approach, which takes account of the situatedness of use and the larger learning context, to observe children?s use of commercially available CD-ROMs in the classroom. We identified the ways in which teachers and students construct narratives to guide learning, the development of multimedia 'literacies', and the interaction of navigation strategies and collaborative learning - and what happens when students use materials which are unsuitable or poorly designed. In such situations, students are unable to construct a learning narrative because operations and procedures interfere with the process. We wanted to consider ways of helping students to construct and maintain their own narratives. As a result of this extensive fieldwork we produced design guidelines which informed the development of a CD-ROM in which we were able to systematically manipulate specific design features.
Matthew Stratfold developed Galapagos, a CD-ROM which runs on PCs and Macs and presents three versions of the same content but with different structures: linear, guided discovery and resource-based. The different versions of the CD-ROM all state the task in exactly the same format and contain the same video and audio content but the task is presented and broken down in different ways by the different structures and the extent to which learners are able to be self-determining in how they go about completing the set task is controlled partly by the narrative. The linear version defines the narrative line in such a way that students are supported throughout the task development by being led through each sub-task in sequence. The resource-based version leaves the student to define the narrative line entirely unaided, and the guided discovery version offers guidance to help students structure task sequence. The purpose of this manipulation is to see to what extent the ?shape? and style of the narrative elements of the interface (a) affect learner behaviour, (b) affect the ease with which they accomplish the task and (c) affect how well they can recall their learning after they have completed the task.
Although the CD-ROM has been developed primarily as a research tool its relatively high production values and its content (using Darwin's experiences in the Galapagos Islands to teach the principles of natural selection), which meets a real curriculum need in the UK, has ensured that it has been warmly welcomed by teachers and students of GCSE Science and Biology. The quality of the CD-ROM's learning design has been demonstrated by the lack of off-task or operational talk during fieldwork in schools and colleges, in great contrast to the observations of students using commercially available CD-ROMs in previous fieldwork sessions.
We have used a semi-experimental approach for our studies to establish the effect of the different structures of Galapagos on learner understanding and construction of narrative. Students have used the CD-ROM in groups of three, not knowing that there are different versions or which version they have, but their use of Galapagos was integrated into their studies and the teacher both introduced the topic and debriefed them afterwards, thus maintaining a naturalistic environment for use of the material. Every session had two video-recorded sources: one recorded the group of students at the computer to capture talk, movement, gesture and machine interaction; the other was the screen image, taken from the computer via a scan converter. These data sources were supplemented by self-recorded responses to questions on the experience, questionnaires to assess experience and confidence with computers, a teacher assessment of oral skills and relevant contextual information and field notes.
We are analysing similar events across the three versions to see how design features interact with students' plans and reactions and establish how these materials can be designed in such a way that they reflect and support the ways in which students think and operate in learning situations and to increase usability, enjoyment and understanding. As a result of this research we will have a better understanding of learners? cognitive processes when using interactive media and we will be able to contribute guidelines and exempla of improved educational design practices which will benefit both learners and producers of these materials. This is central to cognitive engineering in an educational or training context. However, the emphasis is not restricted to the interface as we are also concerned with the role of the teacher and the broader learning context, particularly offering guidance to teachers on the integration of interactive media into teaching and learning activities.
