Careful planning can help to alleviate problems with instructional materials before they occur. In the meantime poorly planned or designed instruction leaves students confused and frustrated as they attempt to interpret the course content and wait for a response to their questions. Course content may be modified after the instructor receives s describing confusion, but this too occurs after a period of time has passed. With the asynchronous nature of the online course it is conceivable that hours or days could pass before a student obtains answers to questions submitted by to an instructor.
This is less likely to occur in online instruction due to the separation of teachers and students. In a face to face classroom an instructor has the immediate opportunity to adjust instruction based on spontaneous feedback by students. All instructional programs benefit from good planning, but it becomes essential in distance education where students are separated from the instructor.
Designing the Multimedia Supported Lesson It has been argued that instructional design is important to distance education due to the critical role of good planning (Zheng & Smaldino, 2003). This may be accomplished through the use of an instructional design process specifically geared toward maximizing the benefits of multimedia for learning. When developing multimedia supported lessons for online instruction it is beneficial to design them with careful consideration of how the multimedia will support communication of instructional ideas. This opens up possibilities for the integration of dynamic instructional content including multimedia representations such as animation, audio, video, and interactive components, which are easily supported by computers. Teaching in the online classroom requires that instructional materials be developed in an electronic form that can be distributed from computer to computer. It is somewhat analogous to children playing telephone with two cans connected by a string except that with online instruction there is a much longer string and far more advanced cans. Instructional information and communications are sent and received through the support of an electronic conduit of computers and cables. The Journal of Educators Online, Volume 2, Number 1, JanuaryĢ Introduction The development of a fully asynchronous online course involves designing instructional materials that may be accessed by students through computers at various times and locations. Support for the use of multiple representations is documented in the research literature. The potential exists to increase the quality of instruction through the careful use of static and dynamic multimedia representations. A central feature of this paper is the importance of the lesson plan, which can include identification of how multimedia will be used to create instructional messages for the lesson. The information presented here may be of interest to online instructors with varied levels of experience, yet it is geared more toward those who are new to online teaching.
1 Designing Dynamic Online Lessons with Multimedia Representations Chareen Snelson, Boise State University Abstract The focus of this paper is on the use of multimedia representations in the online lesson.