Approaches to Cell Biology: Developing Educational Multimedia

It's all around us. On television, at the movies, and on the evening news we see animations that take us inside a fatal wound, demonstrate how a spaceship achieves orbit, or reveal the intricacy of the immune response. Can these powerful new media tools be put to use in science research and teaching? Increasingly college and university faculty are engaged in the business of developing multimedia to augment their work. Science faculty have discovered the power of multimedia to simulate process or change over time, reveal multidimensional structure, and engage their students in useful, interactive scenarios to reinforce their understanding of science. Kenneth C. Green, of The Campus Computing Project, reports that 62.5% of colleges and universities participating in the 2002 Campus Computing Survey offer at least one complete Web-based course. He further reports that well over half the participating institutions of higher education either have a campus Web portal (a large entry point-site to the World Wide Web, offering an array of services and links) now or have one under development (www.campuscomputing.net/). Peterson's online directory (www.petersons.com/distancelearning) lists some 1,100 institutions that provide online degree programs. Course management software providers Blackboard, eCollege, and WebCT report impressive profits and penetration at most colleges and universities throughout the country (Blackboard reports 38% second-quarter growth over 2002 performance, while eCollege reports 27% growth over the same period in 2002). These data point to an increased prevalence of multimedia on college campuses and indicate an elevated student expectation to use multimedia tools in their educational experience. Educational research points to the effectiveness of using multimedia activities in instructional settings. The capacity for repetition, new methods for encouraging student exploration and discovery, assistance with complex and highly visual processes, and accommodation of a wider range of learning styles are all cited as key contributors to the effectiveness of these new tools (Brown, 2000 ; Cuban, 2001 ; Cates et al., 2002 ; Kelly, 2003 ). Building multimedia, however, is not a simple job. From my own biology media projects and working in educational publishing over the past 20 years, I can attest to the time-consuming and often frustrating nature of creating your own activities, animations, or simulations. If you have built a course Web site, constructed illustrated or animated Microsoft PowerPoint lecture slides, dabbled with animation production tools—or just wanted to do those things—this essay is intended for you. We should begin with a few definitions.What is multimedia and What are the delivery options? As the word roots imply, multimedia combines text, images, video, sound, and animation to bring one cohesive experience, in our case, to the learner. A multimedia activity (or product) can be delivered to a student online (over the Internet) or on “hard” media (CD or DVD). It is a common mistake to confuse the delivery mechanism with the product itself. You might find yourself thinking, “I'd like to develop a CD to help my students understand cell division,” when what you should be thinking is, “I want to develop a multimedia activity to help my students understand cell division and I will deliver it to them on a CD.” The scale of multimedia development varies widely. There are very small projects (for instance, a presentation consisting of a stepwise progression of still graphics in Microsoft Power-Point) and very large projects (for example, a library of 3D visualizations to support your research) and everything in between. Whether your project is small or large, the principles and guidelines in this essay should help to get your project off to a good start and make the most of your efforts. This essay begins with a survey of the most commonly used multimedia production software, comparing their advantages and disadvantages. Following that, the essay outlines the steps for getting started, suggests a typical product development pathway, and discusses the various roles (talents and skills) required to complete a multimedia project. A short section on how to effectively run a team and avoid common problems follows and then the essay concludes with an examination of the importance of evaluation.