[quoting Reeves, 24 Oct 96.a] But the actual CBT they were showing boiled down to essentially what we have been doing since the days of Skinner's teaching machine, i.e., show a little content, ask a question about it, judge the learner's response, and provide feedback. This type of CBT can be effective--but the design of it is hardly informed by the last five decades of media research. It is grounded in the principles of behavioral psychology, common sense, hopefully a dash of instructional analysis, enhancements in programming environments, evaluation, and a little creativity. Fifty years of media research helps the designers of this type of interactive learning system very little.
I have been holding back, biting my mouse, and generally just reading. Tom's comment motivated me to finally respond:
WHO REALLY CARES WHICH MEDIUM IS BETTER?
Based on my experiences and observations, most designers have limited choices as to which medium/media to use. Twenty years ago, it was basically print and video simply because someone had invested $500,000 into a video studio, so we are going to produce video to accompany our printed materials. Today, the limitation/trend seems to be to put everything into multimedia because we bought the computers, we have the authoring software, we have a video camera and a scanner, and everyone has a computer on their desktop. Few people have tape recorders anymore and 16mm projectors are a thing of the past.
As a field, right or wrong, we have a long history of simply designing for the latest/hottest/what we got medium/technology. Even after programmed instruction was shown to be rather ineffective as a technology, we started all over again using it in CBI and continue to do so today (confirmed by Tom).
As for the research, I will reiterate what Steve Ross and I said in the first issue of Educational Technology Research & Development, let's focus on which strategies work best in which medium (media replication studies) rather than trying to say which medium is best. It is the instructional strategy that we can use, replicate, and modify.
Now, I am off to design one of those programmed instruction looking CBI projects on statistics for undergraduates that includes QuickTime movies with $40,000 worth of new equipment because we just purchased it. Maybe it will replace Steve's PSI, textbased, stat course that has been around for some 20 years.