An excellent guide to creating instructional multimedia solutions such as computer-based training materials and computer-managed presentations.

This book is intended for students, instructional designers, professors, instructors, teachers, trainers, software developers, and development team leaders who: - are taking a course on creating instructional multimedia applications - are or will be working on an instructional multimedia design and development team - need to expand their skills into the multimedia technology field - are excited about the possibilities of teaching with multimedia - have worked on their own and unsuccessfully tried to do it all - may have created mediocre multimedia courseware - want to do it right the first time - need a practical reference - need practical guidelines for creating computer-managed presentations This book focuses on the practical aspects of creating instructional multimedia applications and computer-managed presentations. In instructional multimedia applications, the computer assumes the teaching role. In computer-managed presentations, you maintain the responsibility for teaching the learners. In a sense, computer-managed presentations are a subset of instructional multimedia applications. Their differences will be highlighted throughout the book. This book will not make you an instructional multimedia expert. Expertise comes through years of experience and continual learning. However, this book will provide you with the foundations for creating professional and effective products. To gain support for your instructional multimedia applications and computer-managed presentations as well as to silence the critics, it is important to create excellent products. People will notice quality much more than quantity. This is especially true for your first project. This book, with its numerous practical hints, will help you do it right from your first project onwards. Since creating instructional multimedia applications requires numerous different skills than traditional methods (e.g., lecture, discussions, print materials...), you should, if possible, involve instructional multimedia specialists in order to do it right. Instructional multimedia productions usually require the combined expertise found in a team of highly-skilled professionals such as instructional designers, subject-matter experts, programmers, and media specialists. However, your reality may be that there are minimal, if any, other resources available to you. Consequently, it may be wise for you to start by creating computer-managed presentations, as they are much simpler to produce. This book provides guidelines that can enable you to create both effective instructional multimedia products and computer-managed presentations. Perhaps the biggest challenge in writing this book is teaching about multimedia with only text and visuals. Ideally, you should use this book in a setting where you can see numerous instructional multimedia examples and you can put the book's guidelines into practice. Since the principles presented (e.g., those for instructional design and screen design) are fundamental guidelines, the principles apply to all computer platforms and software development tools that currently exist and those that will be developed. In other words, the principles presented are independent of the technology being used. Note that some of the included references are dated from the 1980's and even 1970's. The principles provided by these researchers (e.g., in writing objectives, working with teams, using color...) are still valid today and will continue to be valuable in the future. Specific hardware and software tools are not formally addressed in this book. Given that entire books have been written on them, it is not possible to give the tools justice within this book.