Reading summary: Practical considerations for multimedia courseware development: an EFL IVD experience

By Hsien-Chin Liou

Video for Teaching verbs

This article is about an interactive videodisc (IVD) project of courseware development which is conducted by Taiwan National Tsing Hua University to enhance EFL teaching and assist the training in EFL skills for his students. The article described the project in detail from planning, organization, implementing to evaluation. Below is the brief summary of the project.
A. The project:
1. Design considerations of the project includes three aspects:
1.1 The media: Evaluate the merit of an IVD system
a. Presenting complicated types of visual information
b. Presenting rich and authentic target language input for practice
c. Supporting the application of general video to language teaching
d. Providing rich TL input
1.2 According to the present education situation, analyzed the instructional
needs:
a. Strengthen language skills for learners
b. More language courses and native speakers should be offered
c. Provide authentic learning input for learners
1.3 Design principles includes three aspects:
a. Setting of objectives (Develop active use of language by imitate speech
acts; develop speaking skills by imitating pronunciation, stress and
intonation; provide real conversational situation and enough tools and
expose to target language culture)
b. Material selection (Select various speech acts and cultural facts in
sound,graphics, animaton, still and action video; daily life situations
like shopping and making a phone call and feature films. )
c. Instructional design (computer texts include synonyms, definitions of words,
explanations; on-line vocabulary and grammar references using hypermedia
format, different effective teaching method models.)
2 Objective setting incorporating three perspectives:
- The language: including the linguistic and paralinguistic features
- The learner: the training of learning strategies
- The language learning: The negotiated interaction model

3 Instructional design
- Data Analysis and Construction: Some initial data preparation and analysis,
like results of form function, criteria for content selection and item
selected based on content analysis were crucial to facilitate the
instructional design.
- Courseware design: the module included four main units and tree subunits. A
detail explanation of the content, format and screen layout, were mentioned
for each unit. For example, Unit 1 introduced the movie, Unit 2 provided
textual information by hypertext, Unit 3 viewed the film which is fully
controlled by learner and on-line help was provided, and
Unit 4 viewed the film with instruction by teachers.
- Computer managed instruction: Individualized instruction can vary.

4 Implementation:
- Detail explained how to implement the Media formats, Video types, and Audio
types, Equipment, Icon Author Authoring Package, Databases and Design of
Templates.
- Also explained how to conduct computer managed instruction,
individualization of content, sequence, pace and check students’ reading
record.

B. Linking to classroom: It suggested the IVD could be used for individual,
cooperative and class learning for both inside and outside the classroom.

C. Evaluation:
Detail explained the evaluation approach, say, had conducted informal
formative evaluation for the project but summative evaluation and pilot
testing had not been done.

Self reflection:
This article shares the IVD development experience in detail. Making a multimedia courseware seems very completed and time consuming. Though one has an idea, it is no doubt that one has to plan and analysis everything in depth with data support before implementing it.
However, I think it is not easy for me to understand this article because there are a lot of technical terms that I don’t understand. For instance, cast. DBF, Icon Author, CAI etc.


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