The Multimedia Development Team
Developing instructional multimedia is seldom an individual effort. Typically, several people work together to create projects that involve more than just text and graphics but instead involve a pedagogically sound design with interactive exercises and activities as well as assessments and communication approaches that facilitate teaching and learning. Often, with limited resources, some people will have more than a single responsibility. These are the most common members of a multimedia development team:
The Project Manager has the primary responsibility of providing the team with the information and resources that are needed to finish the project. She should oversee the assignment of tasks and the development of a schedule for project completion. Her goal is to stay focused on the big picture while the team members delve into the details of their respective areas. As overall project Editor, she will be a sounding board to team members regarding their decisions as well as doing the final proofing of the project. The project manager serves as the central hub of project oversight. She communicates with the project team, facilitates and documents project task completion, identifies barriers to successful project completion and intervenes with effective solutions.
Specific Responsibilities:
- Receives project assignment from Director.
- Makes initial contact with Content Area Specialist to schedule first meeting where she completes the Project
Narrative form.
- Schedules weekly interactions with the Content Area Specialist (instructor) (E-mail, telephone, face-to-face)
- Maintains weekly contact with the Multimedia Development Team members.
- Documents weekly course progress in Project KickStart and exports HTML updates to the ITRC server.
- Completes Activities section of iProjects (online) after initial meeting.
- Communicates course progress, barriers, and modifications directly to the Project Team during the weekly staff
meetings.
- Reports any unresolved challenges and barriers to the Director.
Content Area Specialist (Instructor)
The responsibility of the Content Area Specialist is to identify :
- The learning problem(s) that justify the project.
- The instructional objectives that it is intended to target.
- Assessment methods that will be useful in determining how successful the "instruction" has been.
The Content Area Specialist is also responsible for providing the CONTENT for the project. By this, I mean that if the software will teach someone how to intepret poetry, then information on analyzing and intrepreting poetry must be provided to the other team members, preferably in some digital form. The Instructor provides the content and materials and teaching expertise to the course project. She communicates directly with the Project Manager and the ITRC team.
Specific Responsibilities:
- Provides all written materials directly to the Project Manager in a digital format (i.e., Word or WordPerfect).-
- Provides a copy of all nondigital (written) material to the Project Manager.
- Provides source photos, images, and/or videos to the Project Manager.
- Is available to the Multimedia Development Team for ongoing clarification regarding the transformation and
design of course materials.
- Communicates course progress, barriers, and modifications directly to the Project Manager during weekly
scheduled interactions.
Lead Instructional Designer
This person is responsible for ensuring instructional integrity of the project through systematic design and clear writing of scripts and storyboards. She is ultimately responsible for the program teaching what it is supposed to teach -- achieving the instructional objectives. The instructional designer accomplishes this by conducting a thorough needs analysis, overall design, and being largely responsible for the actual writing of the storyboards. Her involvement will be intense toward the beginning of the project, but should then taper off afterwards. She will make frequent checks throughout the project to see that programmers and graphic artists clearly understand the storyboards she has provided.
Specific Responsibilities:
- Is available to the Project Manager for weekly interactions and updates on progress.
- Develop appropriate storyboards of course information and activities and provide these to the Project
Manager.
- Make recommendations to the Content Area Specialist and project team regarding the effective use of course
materials in a web-based environment.
This person will work with audio, video, and animation. Because the project might involve so much of this, he might have Multimedia Developers who will work with him. Media elements involving audio and video are developed by this person in conjunction with other team members. Responsibilities may involve recording, conversions from analog to digital, digital editing, and final integration within the project. Distribution is achieved after codecs have been chosen and implemented to optimize the audio and video elements while maintaining acceptable levels of quality. If a version of the project will be accessible via the Internet, he will need to ensure that multimedia components of the project are optimized for this environment. His video segments will depend on scripts provided by the Instructional Designer. He often works collaboratively with the Instructional Designer and Content-Area Expert to create case-based scenarios in which actions and narration are textually depicted prior to creating the first frame of media. He prepares the multimedia materials and ensures that they are suited specifically to the target audience.
There may be more than one Multimedia Developer on a project. This person assists the Lead Multimedia Developer in the development of audio, video, and animation components of the project. He might be responsible for creation and duplication of the final CD-ROM (perhaps one for Mac OS and one for Win OS). He might assure that materials used throughout the project are in adherence with existing copyright regulations by seeking appropriate permissions when necessary. Often, this copyright responsibility is shared with the Content Area Expert since he or she already possesses a great deal of
the instructional materials.
Lead Graphic Artist
This person will take recommendations of interface design from the Instructional Designer and develop visuals to support it. Through collaboration with other team members, she will design appealing and useful graphics and animations. Working collaboratively with the Instructional Designer, she will assist in the development of an overall interface that is functional, intuitive, and simple while being visually pleasing. She might also be responsible for creating the visual design of the labels for the CD-ROMs as well as the cover art for the textbook.
This person's responsibility is to integrate the design, visuals, and the multimedia components of the project into a final software product. As lead programmer, he will ensure that the overall design of the program is intuitive, structurally functional and suited to our target audience's skill level. He will work closely with the Instructional Designer to incorporate her vision of interface design into the final product. He will work closely with the Graphic Artist to develop a visual theme for the program interface. This person might be responsible for the final development of the Web-based version of the project.
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