Intuition, evidence-based guidelines and user feedback in multimedia teaching

The Physclips project

Abstract

Physclips is a suite of online multimedia resources for the learning of physics and represents the most recent outcome of an ongoing collaboration between an intuitively oriented content expert and an educational-multimedia designer. The multimedia project has evolved from an earlier successful project on special relativity and a number of improvements regarding segmentation, user-control, re-usability, content representation and hands-on laboratories have been incorporated. An examination of the research literature reveals that the current design fulfills many of the cognitive design principles recommended for multimedia learning whilst also stretching some of the traditional boundaries regarding the style of animations and their implementation in a broader learning context. Innovative characteristics of the design, including a visually enhanced scrollbar, emanate from a characteristically creative process that involves input from the content expert, multimedia designer, educational researcher and the end-user.

Physclips is one example of how intuition and creativity combine with responsiveness to user feedback and an awareness of the research literature to produce an educational website that has received acknowledgement from various elements of the learning and teaching community. In this paper, we report our experience and what we have learned from teacher- developer collaboration, cognitive design principles and user-feedback. We do this by tracing the evolution of the multimedia design from its predecessor, Einsteinlight, through to the current volume of Physclips.