Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!orion.oac.uci.edu!ucivax!milne
From: milne@ics.uci.edu (Alastair Milne)
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia
Subject: Re: learning styles and presentation design
Message-ID: <285B163B.15144@ics.uci.edu>
Date: 16 Jun 91 07:41:47 GMT
References: <91163.105412ATDYW@ASUACAD.BITNET> <31292@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Distribution: na
Organization: UC Irvine Department of ICS
Lines: 51

In <31292@hydra.gatech.EDU> jt34@prism.gatech.EDU (THOMPSON,JOHN C) writes:

>Has anyone studied optimal learning technolgy/presentation media? I was
>wondering if some people respond best to video, others to still images, and
>still others to text. How does one determine the optimum combination of these
>medias for a given audience? Might we also consider allowing the student to 
>choose the media best suited for his/her learning style.

    I have seen this sort of question rather often, and unhappily,
    it makes an assumption which appears to be unfounded:
    That there *is* in fact such an optimum combination, and that
    an audience (i.e. collection of different people) will respond
    best to a particular version if it can only be discovered.

    What is much more likely is that the individual will respond 
    best to different things; and that what is most effective for 
    him/her will vary both over time and over subject matter.

    How to handle that?  

    Make teaching material highly interactive, to the extent that
    it remains constantly (or at least continually) aware of the 
    user's progress, and of what manner of difficulty the user
    is having at each point.  A program that has this awareness 
    can then respond with a whole series of different forms of assistance
    until, in most cases, a presentation is given which really addresses
    the user's difficulty.  The overall effective of such an organisation
    is that the user winds up going through the program tending to see
    those things that are most useful for him/her as an individual, so
    the program looks very individualised.

    Lots of papers have been written on means of creating this 
    degree of interactivity.  Our own approach to it has been to make
    programs highly conversational, and avoid such extremely restrictive
    mechanisms as multiple choice.  While this often sounds as if it 
    needs quite a bit of help from Artificial Intelligence, it can in fact
    be handled quite effectively with judicious string-fragment matching.

    Notice I haven't said anything about multimedia.  This is because
    this approach is useful no matter what the form of the delivery.
    What multimedia does (do?) for it is expand greatly the variety
    of assistance that can be given.

    If anybody is interested in papers on this subject, please e-mail me,
    and I'll see if I can get our director to send some of the many papers
    he has written on the subject.


    Alastair Milne,

    U. Calif. Irvine