Final Blog

What have you learned in the course about designing instruction from a multimedia perspective?

First of all I want to say that this course has been one of the most challenging courses of my educational career, but it has also been one of the most fun and rewarding classes as well. Designing instruction from multimedia was a completely foreign to me and I am just so grateful to have learned the appropriate tools to make this possible. Before I get into me experiences in Dreamweaver, creating and constructing a website, in which I showcase all the seven singular and multimedia projects, I want to talk about the adobe creative cloud and the programs that we used in it.

The adobe creative cloud is such a powerful tool and I am so happy that for just $19.99/month,  I was able to download and utilize its products. For this course, we used Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Audacity, Premiere and Dreamweaver. CECS 5110 helped me learn how to properly utilize these tools by providing excellent literature, websites with video instruction and excellent feedback turnaround. Dr. Gratch was really amazing at answering specific questions and providing guidance and feedback. As such, I was able to learn how to use the mentioned programs and create instructional modules based on one of my favorite hobbies—disc golf.

As I had mentioned earlier, I had never really created any instructional pieces of my own. As an educator I was always a great user of multimedia design documents, so creating my own specific multimedia learning modules felt so rewarding and exciting. I really look forward to utilizing these practical skills for my work. In fact, as I had mentioned in a previous blog, I am already utilizing adobe tools to create flyers, videos and training modules for my work as a Campus Instructional Technologist.

How would designing instruction be different from a constructivist perspective, based on what you read? Would it?

Multimedia instruction would not be different from a constructivist point of view. In fact multimedia affords learners a better method for learning materials due to controllability of pace and options in learning methods that appeal to the learner. According to the constructivist perspective, People construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences. When we encounter something new, we have to reconcile it with our previous ideas and experience, by accessing prior knowledge.  Learners must ask questions, explore, and assess what we know and in essence become active creators of our own knowledge.