Content Versus Medium: Two Indispensable Yet Distinctly Specialized Components of Multimedia Education

• In Event: Learning Through Broadcast: Enhancing Girls’ Education In Grades 7-10 Through Multimedia Distance Education In Afghanistan

Proposal

Educational content and media components are key considerations for the success of large-scale multimedia distance education programs. These include aspects such as learning objectives, developmental appropriateness of the content, contextual appropriateness of the pedagogy, effective teaching and learning materials and so on. Educators and education researchers play an important role in ensuring these factors are well-integrated throughout the creative and production processes.

Distance education programs do not rely on the traditional medium of face-to-face delivery. Instead, a wide range of educational technologies are used to facilitate asynchronous and synchronous teaching and learning, including television, radio, internet, SMS, and so on. Each of these media types is its own specialization and often people who specialize in these media are not necessarily educators. It is crucial to bring both educational content and media components together to facilitate effective teaching and learning through distance learning technologies. To this end, various processes can be used such as intensive collaboration, joint workshops, training, and quality control mechanisms.

NYU not only worked with our media partner on the design of the project but supported them on the development of the content in order to enhance learning around academic and social emotional learning outcomes. NYU participated in workshops, provided training to the education and media staff, reviewed and gave extensive feedback on content, suggested tools and content to augment learning concepts, contributed to developing checklists and criteria, and supported quality control of the content. This involved extensive communication, often across languages, countries, and research, creative, and production teams.

While challenging and difficult, we learned this to be a critical aspect of multimedia distance education programs. In this presentation, we offer an overview of how educational content and media components relate to each other in distance education programs, how crucial it is for the two components to serve each other, what challenges arise, and what mechanisms can be used to improve the collaboration between the two components and their teams. We will present our key takeaways so far in this process and share real and practical examples around how, if these aspects are not carefully managed, a distance education program could fail even before it reaches the broadcast phase.

Authors

• Abdul Hamid Hatsaandh, New York University

• Farzanah Darwish, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

• Heddy Lahmann, New York University

• Dana Burde, New York University

• Mohammad Jawed Nazari, New York University

• Rena Deitz, New York University