ISSUES OF COMPETENCY AND CONSTRAINTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA COURSEWARE (IMC)

An instructional-sound Interactive Multimedia Courseware (IMC) that is interactive and effective contributes greatly to learning. Good IMC have multimedia components such as text, graphics, animation, video and audio in the courseware to generate interest, motivation and effective learning. It is carefully planned and developed to achieve targeted learning objectives. This study involved a group of university students (n= 94) who are student teachers of The School of Education and Social Development in a public university in Sabah, East Malaysia. They were required to develop IMC (a module) for teaching secondary school students. They were also requested to report on the number of multimedia components that they used in their IMC and also list constraints they faced throughout the period of IMC development. Findings revealed that 93.6% of the subjects used all the multimedia components namely the integration of text and graphics with animation, video or text in their IMC. It also showed that level of students’ IMC programming skills was low in some area such as audio, video and animation production. Given such results, it recommended that institutions of higher learning should provide more multimedia hardware and software to facilitate IMC production and to upgrade the level of multimedia programming skills of student teachers.