Putting Multimedia in Your Training: Does It Help?

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

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What makes a good training program?

When it comes to the many offerings in technology, trainers and trainees often agree that to provide a good training program requires including a lot of multimedia material so as to more effectively demonstrate the functionality of a piece of equipment, software application, etc. This often means the delivery of a presentation by an instructor or via some form of computer or handheld device that will probably include audio, video, animation, special effects--all sorts of things that are supposed to draw us in and engage our ability to learn.

Understandably, we want to keep the attention of students and get them interested in the material. But is the incorporation of multimedia in our training process the route we should be taking?

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A long-standing point held by Richard E. Clark--a well-known professor of educational psychology and technology--is that different forms of media, when introduced into an educational context, do not actually provide significant benefit to the learner. In one of his better known arguments that he presented in 1983, Clark made the comparison that while all of may use a different type of means to travel to a destination (for example, slow car, fast car, etc.), all vehicles still arrive where they need to:

“The best current evidence is that media are mere vehicles that …

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