Interactive multimedia technology has emerged as a major technology in IS, but the educational use of the technology in the discipline of IS is still in its infancy. Many prior multimedia applications have been developed in the area of children education [Armstrong et al. 1994]. However, recent rapid changes in IS technologies, applications, and management require students and employees to have a different set of skills than those emphasized in early twentieth-century IS pedagogy. Many companies and universities are being forced to invent more efficient ways of delivering the new knowledge to keep their students and employees up with the changes.
At the George Washington University (GWU), an educational multimedia program, called KARTT (Knowledge Acquisition Research and Teaching Tool), is developed for teaching knowledge acquisition skills [Bland 1995]. James Madison University (JMU) developed an interactive tutorial package, called "Developing Your First Expert System", to help students understand the basic concepts of expert systems [International Society of Intelligent Systems 1995]. And Mississippi State University (MSU) launched a big project for the development and implementation of computer-based multimedia instructional materials in the IS classroom [Shim et al. 1994]. Besides these universities, many other universities also actively involved in developing multimedia training programs for their students. One company that has begun to harness the power of multimedia for training its worldwide staff is Andersen Consulting. Recently, Andersen Consulting developed the object modeling system, which is designed to help consultants understand the basic concepts of object-oriented programming [Jordahl 1995]. Based on these examples, we can predict that multimedia will play an increasingly larger role in both the university education and the corporation training for IS.
We developed a multimedia program for IS education, named "What's IS All about?", which is designed to integrate the various course materials, to foster the student's analytical and problem solving skills, and to help the student acquire the big picture of IS. Its three objectives can be accomplished by providing students with many perspectives on the same body of information. Experiencing complex material repeatedly under different contexts provides multiple opportunities to gain a deep understanding of the subject [Sprio & Feltovich 1991]. Our multimedia program provides different views of IS by allowing students to explore various IS methodologies and
case studies, and practice their analytical and problem skills. We believe that it helps students and employees acquire the skills for tomorrow's IS professionals. The multimedia program is developed through a University Teaching Center award at the GWU. It currently has two learning modules--one for a general introduction to IS, and the second for understanding the information systems development steps (via a mystery). We are currently in the process of adding four other learning modules (Information Engineering, Object-Oriented Programming/Design, Rapid Prototyping, and the Waterfall Model).
Analysis
The goal of traditional system analysis is to understand a complex system well enough to extend or enhance its functionality to improve efficiently. In the case of educational multimedia system design, the goal is to understand the learning system of the user. The quality of an educational multimedia system is heavily dependent on the system's ability to emulate the user's natural learning system. System analysis in designing the educational multimedia system starts with identifying the target audience. By identifying the target audience, we can specify learning requirements for the target audience; that is, the core skills and learning points around which our multimedia system will be constructed.
Our multimedia system is primarily designed for the introductory courses to IS in both undergraduate and graduate levels at the business school. Therefore, our primary target audience are both business undergraduate and graduate students who are taking these IS courses. We assume that most of them have very limited exposure to IS and that some of them are perhaps computer illiterate. Companies also can use our multimedia system to keep their employees on the cutting edge of the Information Age. Today's competitive business environment requires companies to educate non-IS employees for IS. By using our multimedia system, companies could hopefully increase education effectiveness and lower education cost.
Since our target audience are novices to IS, instruction of our system should focus on delivering basic knowledge, rather than higher-level knowledge. And we need to help the audience learn how to apply important knowledge and expertise to new and unknown situations. Finally, the content of our system should balance technical and managerial knowledge. The need for people with both technical and managerial competence is increasing while most forecasts state that the shortage of people with these skills will increase in the foreseeable future. When our program satisfies the need, it can gain more student's attention, thereby increase educational effectiveness.
Design
In this step, our purpose is on designing a learning environment that is flexible enough to accommodate the multiple, unpredictable approaches learners may take while they navigate information. There are several user interface design guidelines to achieve the purpose.
Maintain Consistency
The basic purpose of consistency is to allow the user to generalize knowledge about one aspect of the system to other aspects. Examples of consistency include using the same color to code information in the same way and placing of menu items in the same position within a menu. In our system, we link green underlined words to hypertext in order to maintain the consistency with color and font of hypertext in Windows Help.
Our system currently has five different types of screens (tutorial sessions, case studies, workshop for problem-solving, exercises, and hypertext). Each class of screens maintains the same background to ensure consistency. The consistency provides the user with feeling about where he/she is in the system. But, we use the same navigation buttons throughout all screens to prevent the user from spending time learning the usage of different types of the navigation buttons.
Accommodate Multiple Skill Levels
Our system should be addressing all levels of student competency, because IS education entails a trade-off between keeping the brightest students interested and risking losing the attention of those who cannot keep up with the material. The system has three layers of knowledge: the basics of IS, problem solving workshop, and IS development methodologies. The user can choose either one depending on his/her interest or ability.
People develop new cognitive structures by metaphorically extending what they already know or are familiar with. The use of metaphor is a very effective way of teaching higher-level cognitive skills. Although people go through new cognitive skills, they cannot gain deep understanding and apply the learned skills to new and unfamiliar situations. In our system, we choose the mystery novel as a metaphor to teach problem solving skills in IS methodologies. Since many are familiar with the mystery novel, and the detective's problem solving steps in a mystery novel is similar to the ones used in IS methodologies, the metaphor will help users to understand the steps easily.
Based on the guidelines, we write storyboards to specify screen layouts.
Name: DefInfo
Purpose: Definition of Information Systems
Definition of Background
Information Systems Music
(Text) (Audio)
Toyota Case (Video)
Develop
Step three is development, in which we build our multimedia system. In this step, we develop more detailed storyboards and encode the storyboards with the authoring system.
Frame Name: InfoDef Frame Type: Lesson Frame Navigation Tool: All_Grey
def.txt def.wav
lesson.bmp toyota.avi
GoTo GoTo
Copyright Frame Information Components Frame
Figure 2: Storyboard
Authoring systems are software tools that enable educators to create the interactive multimedia courseware without involving programming works, thereby allowing those who lack either access to programmers, time to program, or interest in learning programming to quickly produce courseware to supplement their classroom activities [Locatis et al. 1992]. There are currently many computer-based training (CBT) authoring tools on the market. We chose CBT Express of AimTech as an authoring system for our multimedia courseware development. While most authoring systems automate only coding, CBT Express goes much further by using templates to automate screen design. It allows us to concentrate on the educational aspects, not on the technological aspects, of the courseware being designed.