Macromedia Director-MX Lessons Development (MAD-LED) Model: The Immediacy of Online-Distance Teaching-Learning in Multimedia and Real-Time Environments

Statement Of The Problem

Traditional teaching comprises of teacher and learner interacting in a classroom setting. In a lecture based class, a teacher lectures throughout the class time, and students, for the most part, listen and occasionally interact with the teacher. Also, there are students who are introvert types and don’t feel comfortable interacting in front of others. This limits their interaction ability. With the advent of technology and learning tools, education became more reachable to people, including those who live in remote areas as well as those who, for some reason, could not have access to a physical classroom setting. This led to introduction of online and distance education. This was where the lesson was projected to remote site where the teacher was not physically present in the classroom. One important conclusion reported in the paper by Simonson, M. (2006), is the research that found that students have positive attitudes about online learning, and that computer anxiety is not a problem for most students. Well-designed online courses were reported to produce more positive learning outcomes and to be related to overall student satisfaction. Harris, R. A., & Nikitenko, G. O. (2014) compared the online learning with brick-and-mortar stating that, “Overall, students enrolled in the online section (cohort) performed better on the post-test than did students enrolled in traditional ‘‘brick-and-mortar’’ classes in quantitative-skill-based-course. An age variable shows that older students performed much better than younger students on the post-test.”

The challenge with online mode of teaching is the delivery of practical lessons, as the teacher is not physically present as in conventional classroom setting. For the theory lessons it is acceptable as the learners just sit and listen. The lack of interaction leads to boring lectures and thus leading to short attention span and little learning. Such kind of education thus demands the preparation of online practical lessons of courses using the Information Communication Technology (ICT). That is where another challenge arises regarding the utilisation of ICT technology on the preparation of the lesson. Not only is this a matter of preparing a lesson, it needs to be highly interactive. Harasim (1996) states that “Online education shares certain fundamental characteristics with the face-to-face educational environment: interactive group communication .... [where] people can interact with one another in such formats as dyads, seminars, group projects, or role plays, take part in e-lectures, or contact the instructor, tutors, or subject experts all online” (p. 204).