A FRAMEWORK FOR MAPPING MULTIMEDIA TO EDUCATIONAL CONCEPTS

Multimedia provides exciting opportunities to education as it allows educational material to be delivered in a multitude of ways, fine-tuned to enhance the learning experience. By using multimedia in e-learning systems, educational material can be presented in ways that both simplify and enhance learning. Increasingly, educational material developers are taking advantage of multimedia technology to deliver education but use multimedia in a variety of ways that are more based on intuition and personal experience and this often leads to the development of an ineffective learning material. Although there are not many main media prototypes (animation, images, video, text, audio), when examined at sub-prototype level, we find that there are many media types that can be used to present educational information. Given the number of available media sub-prototypes, the choice and mode of delivery of multimedia presents a problem in designing educational material. What media type or combination of types do we use for a given educational concept? What media combinations will improve learning for a particular educational concept? This paper presents a method for the selection of appropriate media for educational material and demonstrates how the method could be effectively used in the design of educational material, suitable for e-learning applications.