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Digital media assignments

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Digital media assignments allow students to demonstrate their learning of course content by creating multimedia learning objects using formats such as video, audio, still images, and text. Assignments include the creation of short video documentaries, digital stories, audio and enhanced podcasts, digital essays, and other types of multimedia presentations. Students present their ideas for peer and/or instructor critique, research and integrate primary and secondary resources, reflect upon and communicate their perspective on what they’ve learned, and use the appropriate tools to structure their assignments.

Examples of digital media assignments

Videos on environmental issues and sustainability – thomas eggert.

Thomas Eggert is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Business and the Environmental Assistance Coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. He had his students teach middle school classes about environmental issues and sustainability, first without using digital media and then incorporating videos into the class. This assignment was valuable to his students both technically and substantively. Technically, students needed to develop the skills necessary to record and edit the video. Additionally, they needed to learn how to develop an entertaining and educational story. Substantively, students needed to understand their content well and learn how to communicate it effectively to reach their intended audience. His students enjoyed creating digital media assignments and thought it was an effective way to teach middle school students.

ONLINE MAGAZINE – KATHLEEN CULVER

Kathleen Culver is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication. Her class of 20 undergraduates spent a semester working in teams to create an online magazine called Curb (www.curbonline.com). The magazine featured various digital media sources, including audio, video, slideshows, and timelines. While her students mainly pursue careers in professional communication, she felt the skills and satisfaction they received from these types of assignments were invaluable. Working with digital media assignments helped students become adaptable and analytical. Having these skills can help lawyers as much as it can help journalists. Through her experience, Culver found that lessons in new tools helped foster students’ creativity when using traditional tools. These skills were transferable with other assignments, such as writing research papers, and traditional skills were transferable with digital media assignments.

Methods of good practice

The resulting methods of good practice can help plan and integrate digital media assignments into a course.

• Assign students to work on projects in small groups to promote student-to-student interaction and to build collaboration skills.
• Provide training and support resources to help students learn new multimedia tools and software. Ensure these resources are available to students at the time of greatest need during the development process.
• Educate students about the resources and methods for acquiring digital assets and the ethical and legal issues related to using these materials in their projects.
• Address a real problem to increase motivation and allow students to share their projects with an audience outside the course to obtain authentic feedback (rather than a strict classroom audience).

The following points should be considered before starting a digital media assignment.

• Meet with a learning technology consultant early in the design process for the assignment.
• Study different examples of digital media assignments to understand and recognize how others have presented information in a multimodal format.
• Develop a digital media assignment before assigning one to students. This will help identify the knowledge and skills students will demonstrate through their digital media assignment.
• Identify and recommend specific technologies students should use for their assignments.
• When selecting technologies, build on technologies that are familiar to students.
• Remember that students can overestimate their technical abilities. Help them assess their level of expertise with the technologies being used.
• Identify campus digital media equipment checkout, support, and student training resources.
• Develop and share the rubric to be used to evaluate their digital media assignment.
• Help students understand the time required to complete a digital media assignment.
• Implement check-in phases of a project to guide students through a thoughtful process (i.e., storyboarding, script writing, rough draft, critique and feedback, and final due date).
• Provide students with small, low-risk activities before giving them an official digital media assignment to allow them to practice and develop communication and media literacy skills.
• Provide in-class time for students to work on their digital media assignments.

Roadmap to success

The following framework helps consultants and instructors think broadly about the assignment objectives and address important pedagogical issues such as:

• integrating research into the assignment;
• scheduling time with subject librarians or technology trainers and
• teaching critical legal issues such as copyright and sharing one’s work with the public.

Use the following checklist to keep projects and consultations on track.

• Students seek primary and secondary sources.
• Students collect and create appropriate digital assets for the assignment.
• Students integrate information from the course.
• Students and instructors have opportunities to work with library staff.
• Students integrate coursework with challenging problems that extend beyond the classroom.
• Students communicate their ideas, perspectives, and emotions in creative ways.
• Students articulate what they are learning using media. Re:construct
• Students and instructors develop a process for planning, producing, revising, and delivering a media assignment.
• Students integrate various forms of media and apply various skills to demonstrate their learning. • Students build new knowledge and understanding of the course content.
• The instructor creates criteria to assess the media assignment.
• Students go through an iterative process to develop their assignments.
• Students receive feedback from the instructor and/or other students in the course.
• Students learn to critique constructively.
• Students share their work for public viewing and reuse.
• Students get a Creative Commons license for their work.
• Students and instructors improve their understanding of copyright issues.

Grading digital media assignments

Digital media assignments can be challenging to assess, especially if students work in groups. The following is a list of suggestions for developing a grading rubric.

• Identify key course learning objectives, outcomes, and skills developed through the digital media assignment.
• If applicable, determine whether students will receive a group grade, an individual grade, or a combination of the two.
• Solicit feedback from students on how the assignment should be graded.
• Consider ways to assess projects on the following: clarity of ideas and details, overall organization, effective use of language, voice, and audience, and technical competence.
• Identify logical phases for the development of the assignment (i.e., storyboarding, script writing, rough draft, critique and feedback, and final due date).
• Provide and/or facilitate feedback sessions for projects at each assignment phase.
• Evaluate the quality of the resulting media by reviewing items such as length, pacing, appropriate use of visual and/or aural transitions, clean edits, and video quality.
• Consider using journals and team feedback for student reflection on the assignment to assess the collaborative creative process.
• Grade the process used in creating the digital media assignment, as well as the product itself.

Teaching with Digital Assignments

• Types of Digital Assignments

Writing for Digital Assignments

• Classroom Considerations
• Digital Pedagogy
• Assignments by T-Shirt Size
• Tools and Technologies
• Digital Storytelling This link opens in a new window
• Open Educational Resources (OERs) This link opens in a new window
• Digital Projects Toolkit This link opens in a new window

Digital Pedagogy Librarian

Digital assignments often have rigorous writing requirements, but can differ from the skills and styles used in composing traditional academic and research papers. Some examples include:

• Multimodal writing, combining text with images, video, and audio
• Script writing for audio and video projects
• Public writing and the writing of content intended for general audiences 
• Descriptive and alternative text
• Transcriptions and translations

While the end product of digital assignments may have a smaller word count than essays and final projects, the writing process may be as (or more) intensive and ask students to engage with knowledge in new ways. This page includes resources related to web writing, public writing, and digital writing that may be useful to educators and students engaged in a variety of assignment formats.

• Digital Writing in the College Classroom A brief article defining digital writing and discussing impacts on curricular and information literacy in higher ed.
• Writing for Digital Media Open access textbook focused on writing and digital media. Includes practical strategies and best practices for different forms of digital content.

Public Writing

• Audience Awareness A brief guide to identifying and writing for an audience.
• Writing for a General Audience A brief guide to making academic and research content accessible to a general audience.
• Public Writing A guide from University of Washington with practices and resources about writing for public audiences on the web and in other mediums.

Script Writing

• Create a Script for Your Digital Project A guide to writing a script for digital stories and other types of audio and video projects.
• Creating a Great Podcast Script: 3 Methods Top Podcasters Use An article describing different approaches to writing scripts for podcasts.
• The Journey from Print to Radio Storytelling A guide from NPR with tips for creating effective scripts for audio storytelling projects.

Writing for the Web

• Web Style Guide A user-focused style guide for web content. Chapters 10 - 11 focus on writing and use of images and video in web contexts.
• Writing Clearly and Simply for the Web Guidelines for organizing and writing text content for general audiences on the web.

Accessibility

Descriptive and alternative text are additional forms of writing needed for accessibility in digital stories. Non-text content, including audio, images, data visualizations, figures, and other visual information, should include text that describes what is being communicated. Accessibility considerations can improve your script writing, text-based content in web stories, and selection of multimedia content.

• Writing Helpful Alt Text A simple guide to writing descriptive text for visual information.
• Image Description Guidelines Guidelines and tips for describing all types of images, including diagrams, maps, equations, tables, and more.
• WebAIM: Alternative Text Guide to writing and applying alternative text to many kinds of images.
• DCMP Description Key Guidelines and best practices for describing educational video.
• ABS Guidelines for Verbal Description Guide to descriptions for works of art.
• Writing Accessible StoryMap Content A guide from ArcGIS explaining how to format and edit content for accessibility.

Additional Reading

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• Last Updated: Aug 5, 2024 11:32 AM
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Planning, Implementing and Evaluating Digital Assignments

Once you have selected an appropriate assessment format, good planning and design of the digital assignment is essential to ensure meaningful and fair evaluation of learner success. The following sections will guide you through this development process.

Designing with Pedagogy

Good digital assessment design places pedagogy before technology.

Click on the “+” icons in the image below to reveal strategies for designing with pedagogy in mind.  

You may find it helpful when planning the assignment to consider the steps your learners will take from start to finish as they work through the project.

Most digital media projects follow the same basic steps:

• research the topic
• gather relevant content (verify copyright permissions)
• develop a script / storyboard / mock-up / sketch / outline
• learn how to use the digital media tool
• create the final product
• publish / share

Read through the scenario. Use the arrows to navigate between slides.

Selecting Digital Media Tools

It is important to consider the digital tools your learners will use for their alternative assessments. If they are completing a digital media assignment for the first time, specify the tool(s) that you would like them to use. Allow more experienced learners to select from a list of recommended options. It can be challenging to choose an appropriate digital tool from the many that are currently available. Follow these tips to find the right tech tool for your online assignment.

Select a topic below, marked with an arrowhead, to reveal more information.

Do not assume all your learners are tech savvy. A quick class survey can help determine your learners’ skill and comfort level with various digital media tools. Select a tool that is within reach of their comfort zone.

Do not ask learners to use complicated technology when a simpler option would achieve the same results. For example, using smartphones to record videos rather than a video camera, or creating simple graphics with an easy-to-use tool such as Canva rather than a pro-level tool such as Photoshop.

To ensure equitable assessment opportunities, do not ask learners to purchase software or equipment to complete their assignments. Many digital media creation tools offer free versions with basic functionality. Look up the product’s accessibility statement or VPAT to ensure that the tool follows the POUR principles for accessibility (perceivable, operable, understandable and robust). Avoid online tools that ask users for personal information not essential for use. Consult your institution’s accessibility and privacy teams for help with these tasks.

Online course participants will turn to online resources for help. Select a tool that has easy-to-follow help documentation or tutorial videos. Include links to these resources with the assignment instructions.

Learners enrolled in online courses likely will not be coming on to campus. While your institution may have audio / visual studio space and offer equipment loans, online learners might not be able to make use of these services, and instead will need to rely on the technology they have on hand. Moreover, learners in the global classroom may not have access to your selected web-based tool in their country of residence and may need to find an alternative.

Here are some easy-to-use, free tools and options for creating various kinds of digital media: Download this list of tools [PDF] .

• Adobe Creative Cloud Express
• iMovie (macOS and iOS)

Animated Videos:

• Google Sites

Infographics:

• Garage Band (macOS and iOS)

Screen Recording:

• Screencast-O-Matic

Read through the scenario.

Supporting Digital Media Assignments

As you plan your digital media assignment, consider what support and training your learners will need.

In the interactive element below, use the menu bar (☰) on the left or the arrows on the right to view the content on all 4 pages.

Use the Digital Media Assignment Planning Worksheet to help with your digital media assignment design.

Evaluating Digital Media Assignments

Digital assignment evaluation presents unique challenges and opportunities for instructors. How do we apply fair grading practices to alternative assessments such as videos, websites, podcasts, and infographics? How do we take advantage of these digital formats to provide rich feedback to our learners? The following strategies address these questions.

In your planning stage, you determined the assignment complexity needed to demonstrate achievement of the learning outcome(s). Align the assignment weight with this complexity. For high-stakes digital media assignments that take place over several weeks or months, consider breaking the assessment into a series of lower-stakes assignments, such as conducting a literature / media scan, drafting a storyboard, and producing the final product.

If you find that the digital media assignment requires more work than merited by the learning outcome, simplify the complexity of the assignment to match what you are measuring.

Rubrics promote consistency, simplify grading, make evaluation criteria explicit, and provide meaningful, actionable feedback to learners. As you develop your rubric, use the learning outcomes to determine and weight the evaluation criteria. Do the learning goals for your digital media assignment relate to content, style, or technological skills? What are the main indicators of performance in each of these areas? How much should each area contribute to the overall evaluation?

The following rubric examples for various digital media provide some suggested weightings for measuring content and knowledge, style and design, and technical skills.

• Sample animated video rubric [DOC]
• Sample live action video rubric [DOC]
• Sample infographic rubric [DOC]
• Sample podcast rubric [DOC]
• Sample script / storyboard rubric [DOC]
• Sample website rubric [DOC]

Module 4 presents detailed guidance on developing rubrics for authentic and alternative assessments.

Encourage meta-cognitive behaviour and a deeper awareness of the steps and challenges involved in creating digital media by inviting learners to co-develop the evaluation criteria. By considering what they believe are the most important knowledge and skills to demonstrate, learners gain a better understanding of the assessment goals and the performance expectations. Begin the brainstorming process early and allow users to make suggestions throughout the duration of the assignment as their learning and skills progress.

The shareable nature of digital media provides many opportunities for peer feedback and peer assessment. Create a space in your online course discussion board for learners to upload their digital media projects and constructively share comments, or use a multimedia sharing tool such as Wakelet . Set up a private YouTube or MS Stream channel to create a class playlist of learner-generated videos. See Module 4 for peer assessment and feedback resources.

Review – Reflect – Revise. Remember to review, reflect on, and revise your digital media assignment after your learners have submitted their work. Refer to “Coming Full Circle” in Module 2 for more information on how to evaluate the effectiveness of your assessments.

Rethinking Assessment Strategies for Online Learning Copyright © 2022 by Seneca College; Durham College; Algonquin College; and University of Ottawa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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This hub is an online digital media skills lab where you can learn more about computers, building content, presentations, digital stories, and more.

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What is Copyright?

Copyright for digital media assignments : what is copyright.

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What is Fair Use?

Fair use is a doctrine of US Copyright Law, allowing for the limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the copyright holder. It permits legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another creator's work using a 4-part balancing test. The tricky part about Fair Use is that the balancing test is subjective and open to interpretation.

The four factors judges consider are:

• purpose and character of your use
• nature of the copyrighted work
• amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
• effect of the use upon the potential market.

Do you ever wonder why:

•  iTunes charges you $1.29 per song?
• videos on You Tube of recent episodes of Stranger Things  are quickly taken down?

COPYRIGHT!!! 

Copyright is a federal law that gives creators of media the exclusive rights to copy, distribute, and mash up the things they create for a limited time.  As you work on any assignment that includes digital media (e.g., images, video, or music) it is good practice to make sure you are abiding by copyright laws. 

Copyright Sources

General resources on copyright law:

• US Copyright Office US Copyright Office's homepage that includes many resources including information on licensing and registration.
• Center for Media & Social Impact They investigate, showcase and set standards for socially engaged media-making.
• Copyright Basics A brief overview of Copyright Law by UW-Madison Libraries

Additional Fair Use Resources

• Fair Use An excellent explanation of Fair Use by Stanford University Libraries. It also includes a list of several music cases with explanations on the courts' decisions.
• Fair Use Evaluator Another helpful tool for you to evaluate "fairness" of the use of a copyright work. This tool is more interactive and will take you through a series of online forms and provide you with a color coded "fairness" result.
• Fair Use Checklist A useful tool from Columbia University Libraries that will help you begin your own assessment to see if your project can be considered fair use.

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• A Fair(y) Use Tale

Prof. Eric Faden of Bucknell University (fairly) compiled clips from Disney movies to create a video explaining Fair Use. Double-click the video to see it larger in You Tube.

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If you're wondering where to begin with integrating a digital activity or assignment into your course, here are a few steps and principles we suggest for getting started:

Identify the specific learning goal/s you want the digital assignment to address. Think about how a digital assignment might help students gain a different perspective on particular content or methods in your course. Have there been specific roadblocks your students have faced that a digital approach might transform?

Methods before tools. Is your learning goal related to geographic or spatial questions? Then you might need mapping. Understanding relationships between people/places/event? Then maybe network analysis. Seeing patterns in a larger text? Then text mining. Understanding spaces, objects, and materials? Then maybe 3D. Presenting work in less conventional formats? Then maybe a digital exhibit or media production.

Find the tool/s that match your method/s and fit the possibilities and constraints of the class. For any given digital method, there are likely many tools you could choose from. When making your selection, keep in mind the skill level of your students and what you can reasonably expect them to learn in the timescale of the assignment. Also think about access, both for the purpose of the course and beyond it—free and open source tools often do as good or better a job than expense software, plus they will be available to your students after they leave your class, and even after they leave UCSC.

Try to match digital skills with the critical knowledge your course aims at. As much as possible, make the technical challenges your students navigate bring them into direct engagement with the critical thinking and disciplinary skills your course aims to teach. Avoid digital tasks that are light on substance. "Bells and whistles" is the not the aim—engaged learning is.

Think carefully about timescale: Should this assignment take students a week to complete? Two weeks? Half, or maybe the entire quarter? Make sure that both the level of technical skill and the importance to your overall learning goals are good matches to the scale of assignment you choose.

Consider the end product you want: Do you want students to produce something they turn into you? Do you want them to have something that they can share (if they wish) with the wider world when the course is complete? Or, would the learning experience of an ungraded in-class activity do the trick?

Don't underestimate the challenges and anxieties that surround learning new digital skills : Some might assume that so-called digital natives (Gen-Zers) would take to new digital tools quickly and easily, but that is often not the case. Most students have interacted with technology primarily as consumers. You will be asking them to become, in some small way, a producer of digital content. You'll likely want to consider building in a generous amount of time and resources for both instruction and troubleshooting.

Consider group work and group assignments: We find that students often learn new digital skills better when they're working with peers. Within a group, students who might have felt overwhelmed on their own can ask questions and get help in a lower-stakes environment. Group work can also help students who have accessibility challenges engage more easily than if they were on their own.

Ask students to reflect on their process, not just produce an end product: Having students actively think about—and document—the decisions they make along the way can reveal both to them and to you how choices that might seem purely technical are actually interpretive. For instance, placing a point on a timeline might involve the more implicit work of deciding whether something is a single event or multiple events. Selecting colors and symbols for a map involves engagement with questions of representation. Arranging a digital exhibit or website in one way and not another is an opportunity to consider not just ease of design but deeper arguments implied by a particular arrangement. Having students document these processes allows you to see the intellectual effort that went into the entire project, not just the end product. Grading both the process and the final result can help address the reality that some may create a less aesthetically pleasing product but have put in a substantial amount of critical engagement with the course content along the way.

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Land Acknowledgement

The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.

The land acknowledgement used at UC Santa Cruz was developed in partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band Chairman and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program at the UCSC Arboretum .

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McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning

Developing grading rubrics/assessment criteria for multimedia assignments, introduction.

Multimedia assignments can involve a wide range of formats, including digital posters, podcasts, timelines, visualizations, digital/online exhibitions, websites, blogs, presentations, and video. These assignments have the potential to give students opportunities to communicate ideas and make arguments in new ways. Digital projects also lend themselves well to group work and can give students the chance to use background knowledge and skills. At the same time, these assignments can be challenging to grade, especially if you have not attempted these types of assignments before.

Thankfully, many of the good habits in designing more traditional assignments also apply to the creation of digital assignments and can make the process of grading students’ work much easier. Establishing and clearly communicating learning goals, for example, can reassure students that they are being graded on their understanding of the course material and their ability to convey that understanding as opposed to their artistic or creative abilities and aptitude with digital tools. Establishing a clear drafting, review, and revision process, similar to more traditional writing assignments, can not only lead to better outcomes, but can also provide more consistent and systematic criteria for assessment.

Many of these multimedia or digital assignments, however, are by their nature more intimately tied to the medium. These assignments have the potential to provide faculty opportunities to set learning objectives pertaining to both content and form, to the choice of medium as well as the message, and to make students aware of the relationship between the two. As new forms of media afford new ways to craft arguments, multimedia assignments can provide opportunities to reflect upon these affordances and to assess student work based both on the message and on the skill and creativity with which they used the medium.

Considerations for Assignment Design

• Based on the goals of the assignment, select a few tools that students may use to complete the assignment. Allowing students too much freedom in choosing their medium can make grading more difficult and can confuse the message that you are trying to convey with the final product. If some students are producing video documentaries, for example, and others are creating websites, will you be able to develop grading criteria that will evaluate different media evenly? Within each assignment type (mapping, timeline, podcast, website, etc), you will find several different tools that offer slightly different affordances. You can always consult with McGraw Center staff to learn more about digital tools commonly used for course assignments.  
• Students may not know how long a multimedia project might take, or how best to manage their time working on it. Scaffolding the project by creating multiple due dates to review progress can clarify expectations and help students effectively structure their efforts to produce their best work.  
• Consider having students produce a written reflection of the entire assignment process. This can give you an additional gradable item as well as inform your design of future multimedia assignments. If you have created a group assignment, students might also appreciate the opportunity to outline and explain their personal contributions to their group’s work.

Considerations for Assessing the Assignment

• Establishing grading criteria should be an early step in creating a multimedia assignment. What do you hope students will gain by having completed this assignment? Is it important that students consider the unique aspects of their chosen medium? Clarifying your learning goals for multimedia assignments well as more traditional types of assignments can help you determine what you’d like to prioritize in assessment. Decide what is important to you in this assignment: the process of developing the project, the teamwork involved, the final product or presentation of the final product, academic rigor, or all of these things. From this, you can determine the amount of weight to give to each area in your grading.  
• Assessment can also take into account how students use the medium to tell their story or make their argument. For instance, if students are incorporating audio clips from an interview into a podcast assignment, will you grade them on how engaging the clips are to the listener or how clearly you can hear the audio (aspects related to the podcast form) in addition to how well the clips reflect an understanding of course themes (an aspect related to content)?  
• Even if you are more interested in the academic content than in the technical proficiency of student work, it’s a good idea to include some assessment of the quality of their execution of the project . This can incentivize students to channel their efforts into learning to use the new tools as opposed to perceiving them as extraneous to the “real” assignment.  
• Don't assume that your students have the necessary expertise or experience with digital tools because they are 'digital natives'; most students have more experience consuming media than creating it. It is important to make sure students develop the new skills they need to complete the assignment as part of the course . This could take the form of an in-class workshop, low-stakes practice assignments, or tutorials/asynchronous content that is incorporated into class time. As an example: if you expect that the podcasts that your students submit are free from distortion or excessive noise, you should dedicate class time to teaching recording skills.  
• As consumers of media students can have valuable insights into how digital assignments should be assessed. Consider including students in a discussion of how they think their projects should be graded .

Developing Rubrics

• Set clear goals by creating a concrete rubric that outlines criteria for grading. You can find some basic examples of rubrics below. A rubric will make it much easier to assess the quality of student work based on systematic and consistent criteria. You might even consider distributing your rubric to students at the outset so that they have a clear understanding of your expectations.  
• Decompose the process into the various phases of planning, production, and presentation, then grade students based on their effort in each. Weight different aspects of the assignment corresponding to different aspects of the process, including different responsibilities within a group project.  
• In group projects, students often delegate portions of the project. Determine whether everyone will get the same grade or whether their performance will be graded individually. If you choose to grade students collectively as a group, consider how you will handle situations in which students do not contribute enough to the project.  

Sample Podcasting Assignment Rubric

Sample Blogging Assignment Rubric  

• Almeida, Nora. "Podcasting as Pedagogy." Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook, Vol. 2. Nicole Pagowsky and Kelly McElroy (Eds.). ACRL Press, 2016.
• Buddle, Chris. “ Hear This! Podcasts as an Assessment Tool in Higher Education .” Teaching for Learning @ McGill University, 18 Feb. 2014.
• Hall, Macie. “ Multimedia Assignments | The Innovative Instructor.” February 25, 2014.
• Bartel, Tracy. “ Inspiring Student Engagement with Technology .” The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. March 19, 2015.
• Bell, Ann. “ Podcast Rubric .”. University of Wisconsin - Stout.
• “ 10 Tips for Successful Multimedia Assignments ". Instruct @ UMass. blog , Instructional Media Lab, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. March 8, 2013
• Reyna, Jorge, Jose Hanham, and Peter Meier. “ A Taxonomy of Digital Media Types for Learner-Generated Digital Media Assignments .” E-Learning and Digital Media 14, no. 6 (November 1, 2017): 309–22.
• Reyna, Jorge, “ Digital Media Assignments in Undergraduate Science Education: An Evidence-Based Approach .” Research in Learning Technology 29 (2021).
• Walker, Leila. “ On Crafting an Assignment Sequence for a Collaborative, Web-Based Final Project in a Composition Course. ” The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (blog), May 21, 2015.

[Updated February 2021]

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Effective Multimedia Assignments

Faculty who are creating new multimedia assignments often have many initial questions. There’s technical knowledge that needs to be learned along with tips and templates for how to introduce, scaffold, and assess the assignments themselves. The goal is always to ensure that the assignments are meeting actual pedagogical objectives and student learning outcomes. In addition to the general resources and media-specific resources listed on this page, faculty are also welcome to leverage any of the Resources on this site. Faculty can also make an appointment with the Digital Media Commons or their Liaison Librarian for assistance with assignment creation.

General Advice and Guides for Multimedia Projects

Frameworking remote multimedia assignments for success.

This presentation, given as part of the Adapt 2020 conference, focuses on two frameworks in order to ensure that multimedia assignments for online classes encourage students success. The first, is the production framework of pre-production, production, and post-production. By having students work through their multimedia projects in those phases and provide deliverables in each of those three phases, faculty can ensure that students are making timely progress on their assignment and are not blind-sided by how much work it can take to create the final deliverable. The second framework is the three parts needed for students to be effective creators of multimedia projects: genre instruction, technical training, and in-process feedback. It’s crucial that multimedia projects are not seen as only a technical exercise but require both instruction in the medium/genre and ability to get in-process feedback in order to ensure that students are making rhetorically effective projects.

Frameworking Remote Multimedia Assignments for Success.pdf

Blended Traditional and Contract Grading Rubrics

One way to ease students’ worry about creating a multimedia project is to provide exacting requirements about the technical execution of that project that are in turn graded simply as achieved or not achieved, with no partial points awarded based on subjective criteria. This practice can eliminate confusion on the part of the student who is learning both how to execute a multimedia project and what actually makes an effective piece of media in that genre.

Media-Specific Assignment Guides

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