Missing the Irony

My work as an instructional designer at Penn State is primarily at the course level; I am assigned to a particular course, and one or more faculty members are also assigned to the course as the content experts. If the course includes the development of multimedia elements (as they often do), part of my job is to help coordinate the creation of these elements. If the multimedia elements are not too advanced, I can sometimes chip in and help out. For the most part, though, I stay out of the way of the experts: primarily my uber-talented and perpetually overworked colleagues Mark & Dean.

Since the summer I've been working on articulating what I consider to be an important evolution: a push toward the development of small, easy content creation tools that allow faculty to generate some multimedia content on their own.

The development of such tools moves content creation toward ownership by the content expert. This has several advantages, the most obvious being efficiency and accuracy. An astronomy professor knows exactly what they want to say. If it were possible to create instructional materials directly, control of when and how that happens is in the hands of the content expert. Consider the use of PowerPoint and other presentation tools for lectures; there is typically no need for an instructional designer to act as an intermediary between the knowledge and the technology in these cases. The tools are simple enough to allow for the direct creation of materials.

A note of clarification: there will always be a need for multimedia content creators, simply because the demand will continue to increase as the level of sophistication of the media tools improves. Furthermore there is the issue of fundamental artistic talent; easy to use tools won't help someone with no sense of perspective, use of negative space, shading, etc. So I guess what I really have in mind is not necessarily the artistic/illustrative work, but more of the simple functional tasks.

By way of example, my colleague Mark and I worked on a multimedia module as a test case for the creation of a small, reusable content creation tools. Mark, I believe, shares my opinion on the long-term benefits of direct content creation. Earlier this year we discussed a vision of a “toolbox” of small applications that would be available to anyone. The initial project centers on the creation of self-assessment "hint" activities that can be incorporated into online course materials.

The hint activity allows students to ask for additional information while attempting to solve a problem. The number of questions and hints can be determined by the faculty member. The actual content in the “question,” “hint” and “answer” fields can include text or images (pictures, photos, graphs, etc.).

Here’s an example of the interface for a lesson of college algebra. I created similar activities for statistics that incorporates more graphs, tables, and images. The overarching idea is to reduce the barriers to content creation with tools that are simple and easy to use, but produce something of acceptable quality. In other words, get out of the way of the content experts. This is still a work in progress, of course, and we haven't had much time at all to work on it. But I like the basic idea of progressively releasing information (or "hints") to learners. 

One of the sources of inspiration for this idea came from a trip to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Learning Technologies conference last year. While there, I learned about a reusable instructional content creation tool from the University of Wisconsin called the Concept Tutor. The things I liked about it: it's contained; its wizard is pretty good; it lets one use graphics, animations, etc; and most importantly, a test with a real-life faculty member showed it could be used successfully.Like a "hint" activity, concepts are ideal because they can be easily deployed across virtually all academic disciplines.

There are other small tools out there like Hot Potatoes that allow for the quick creation of quizzes and crossword puzzles. Dan Lim has some Flash games that are easy to use. But I think there's an opportunity within Penn State to work toward creating some tools ourselves. I'd be willing to bet that World Campus, Liberal Arts, Arts & Architecture, and many others are creating or soon will be creating some forms of content creation tools. How great would it be if these were shared in a common "toolbox," along with examples & documentation? And tools could be added to the box as we all move forward.

For my part, I make a point to ask faculty I meet (either through work or socially) what kinds of tools they might be interest in or perceive a need for. Some of the tools that come up already exisit, and many are highly specific to one discipline. But some are easily generalizable across disciplines, and would be valuable.