Session focus: A substantial body of research, developed over several decades, shows that combining different media in learning activities has the potential to improve student learning. As high-bandwidth internet connections have proliferated and as media manipulation software has become cheaper and more user-friendly, interest has grown among students and faculty members in creating and using multimedia materials, incorporating images, audio, video, and animation, which are designed to enhance students' educational experience. In this context, the question arises of what is the best way of using multimedia materials in education. At the University of Minnesota, faculty from the College of Biological Sciences collaborated with multimedia designers and researchers from the Office of Information Technology's Digital Media Center to plan, develop, implement, and study custom video podcasts, or "vodcasts", to be used in large introductory Biology classes. The vodcasts combined animation and video segments with music and faculty voiceover in multimedia packages three to ten minutes in length. The content of the vodcasts was selected to address areas in the biology curriculum which have historically presented difficulties for introductory students, particularly with respect to evolutionary theory. Class capture technology is another way of combining auditory and visual material to produce student learning aids. While the synchronous delivery of face-to-face classes to remote locations via instructional television has been possible for decades, only since about 2004 have instructors had the ability easily to capture the audiovisual components of a class in digital format and to deliver them via the internet for asynchronous, on-demand student use. Capture systems produced by a variety of vendors are becoming more popular on college campuses in virtue of their ease of use for instructors and their portability and overall convenience for students. In this presentation, we describe the design and production of both custom vodcasts and class captures for an introductory Biology class, and we showcase a multi-year research project which investigates the relative benefits to students of these two forms of multimedia. Beginning with pilot research in fall 2007 and culminating in the implementation of a quasi-experimental research design in spring of 2009, we highlight differential effects of vodcasts and class captures on student reactions and student learning. We conclude with an analysis of why the different approaches to multimedia integration had the different effects they did, and with recommendations for faculty members interested in introducing multimedia elements into their own teaching. Research results: The main independent variable of interest in this study was student use of different types of multimedia technology. One dependent variable was student learning, measured at the end of the term using standard College of Biology instruments. Learning was also measured by means of a series of evolution knowledge questions delivered to students at the beginning and at the end of the semester. The other dependent variable was student reception of the multimedia resources available to them, measured at the end of the term by means of a student survey and two student focus groups. The research questions for this study were: 1. Are class captures or vodcasts better at promoting student learning in introductory biology? 2. What is the nature of student use of class captures and vodcasts? Our hypotheses were that vodcasts would be shown to be superior to class captures in promoting learning, and that the vodcasts would be used more frequently and more enthusiastically by students. The results presented at this session confirm these hypotheses in most respects. Importance or relevance to other institutions: Educational multimedia materials have great potential as ways of enhancing student learning, and today's "millennial students" are increasingly enthusiastic about such materials. Our research shows that multimedia resources constructed to integrate with a particular curriculum, and targeted to address known student misconceptions in a field of study, are received better by students and produce better learning outcomes than materials that consist of class sessions captured and transferred into a digital format. However, our examination of the multimedia development process shows that the production and implementation of custom multimedia resources is a high-cost endeavor. For this reason class captures may provide a lower-cost yet still pedagogically useful solution for many instructors and institutions.
