Using animation on the Web in teaching plant biology

This paper describes the design, development, and delivery processes of multimedia modules such as Macromedia Flash®, Shockwave movies®, and Quicktime movies®. These modules were employed to teach a undergraduate plant biology class at a large southwest university. Each medium has different strengths and weaknesses and their proper use resulted from the collaboration among the content experts, instructional designers, and multimedia developers. Equipped with Web technologies, instructional designers have abundant resources to deliver courses using multimedia and rich interactivity. However, design is only one of several crucial factors of a successful web-based course. No matter how rich the media features are, obstacles during implementation hinder students from effective learning. For example, faculty without experience in multimedia development and distance education may underestimate the required cost and resources, which may result in a delay of delivery and frustration on the part of the instructor and students. Digital movies are said to be a useful illustration tool, however, lack of appropriate plug-ins and bandwidth may make the media unusable instructionally. In light of these potential obstacles, this paper discusses how a major university designed, developed and delivered a feature-rich web-based plant biology course . It was found that in this case the actual design and delivery processes were more problematic than development of the instructional modules. Solutions derived from our experience are suggested. In order to deliver the course effectively, use of multimedia animation were considered because several concepts in biology are process-based; it is more instructionally beneficial to illustrate those concepts in animation than plain text. The implementation of this multimedia web-based course was divided into three stages: Design, Development, and Delivery.