Lights, camera, action! Using multimedia resources to enhance learning outcomes of Information Technology undergraduate students

The field of Information Technology is a rapidly changing field; it can be hard to predict what the future holds in the land space of higher education. When it comes to educating increasingly diverse students in this field, educators and higher education sectors require innovative ways to deliver learning in this fast-changing, digital world. Our aim of this study was to determine how best to efficiently and effectively enhance the learning experiences and outcomes of students with a focus on a series of multimedia resources. While there is a considerable amount of literature on the use of multimedia resources in digital learning, existing literature is limited as to how to achieve this with Information Technology students who are considered already ‘tech-savvy’. For this study, we used an array of various multimedia, namely short premium videos and recording of physical classes and narrated lecture slides for the delivery of a unit with 1st year students in an undergraduate IT course. We analyzed the metrics of each video on a number of variables drawing from a small online survey, which captured students’ feedback, and a University-led evaluation survey in order to gain further key insights. Our research shows that students engaged and learned more through short, succinct, high quality resources that are linked to learning outcomes as compared to 1-2 hour long ‘traditional’ lectures and lecture recordings. Additionally, University evaluation survey demonstrated that: 90.4% of students were satisfied with the unit and 95.3% stated that the learning resources in this unit helped them to achieve the learning outcomes. This study not only offers a set of considerations and recommendations for the education of Information Technology but also for digital learning in higher education more generally, in order to better design, develop and deliver online courses through the use of multimedia.