Multimedia Content Projects

You don’t always have to be the author of the multimedia that is helping your students learn. Consider assigning a project wherein your students create a multimedia asset to demonstrate their knowledge of a concept. Instead of having students write a paper on a topic, you can invite them to explore different media that will better help them to meet your learning objectives for the assignment. While you could ask them to use a particular medium or set of media, you can also invite them to be creative with the media they choose.

Asking students to analyze an assignment and its goals and choose the media that will best meet their needs will prepare them for a changing workplace where they may be expected to “wow” an employer who hasn’t given them specific instructions for a presentation. Assessing the requirements of an assignment and finding the tools to assist them encourages critical thinking skills and develops maturity as they take ownership of their work in both form and content.

You don’t need to be an expert in multimedia to ask students to be creative! There are many web tutorials available for them to develop proficiency with a tool, and we’ve provided some ideas below for you to consider. Check out the eLearning Toolbox for a number of helpful tools you could use.

If this sparks an interest to do more with multimedia projects and you’d like some guidance, feel free to make an appointment for a one-on-one consultation with an Instructional Designer at Simmons Online.

Google Maps as Storyteller

• Students can use Google Maps (or other map interfaces) to connect digital content to specific locations around the world or in their own neighborhood.
• Students could interview people who live in different neighborhoods in Boston, and post the recorded interviews on a map for people to explore and “get to know” their city.
• Clinical students can connect public health information to a map, and demonstrate the ways that different healthcare practices or diseases affect communities on a micro or macro scale.

Data Visualizations

• Ask students to collect and analyze data, and create visualizations to help convey the data in an accessible way. They can put together presentations or videos to share their visualizations, and demonstrate how different types of visualizations convey different stories from the data.

Game Developer

• Looking to communicate the stories of people and the reasons they make decisions? Create a simple text-based game (or supplement it with videos or audio recordings) where classmates can choose to make decisions at each point in a person’s story. See the results of their decisions, and gain empathy for the struggles people face.

Blogs

• You can use blogs for more than sharing your thoughts with the world each week. Use a tool like blogger to post different ideas and stories about different people, cities, or other issues. The blog can be a tool to share different viewpoints, debates, relevant videos, and communicate the information in a new way.

Social Media

• Students can analyze the way a public figure communicates using social media, and create new posts in the style of the public figure to demonstrate their patterns. This can be accompanied by a presentation, paper, or recording about why their style is successful or unsuccessful. As an example, see this Buzzfeed article on the tweets of Donald Trump: http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/trump-tweets-the-classics#.kp2K44qo5R

Marketing Campaign

• Campaigns include many components that all work together toward a common goal of spreading important information or selling a product. Ask your students to put together a full marketing campaign, including written plans, one-sheet visual descriptions for stakeholders, video advertisements for television and web, and copy for print ads.