Media and Learning Debate

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Media and Learning: A Review of the Debate
Ramona R. Materi, BA, MPA
Ingenia Training
www.ingenia-training.com
Copyright Ingenia Training and Consulting International 2000-2001
The media and learning debate in distance education has carried on for several decades. It is an important discussion, since educational institutions and private companies spend millions of dollars on technology annually. They need to know if they can gain learning benefits from employing a specific medium to deliver instruction.
This paper reviews the work of Richard Clark and Robert Kozma, who take opposite positions in the debate. It then examines the work of Jack Koumi, and predicts how Clark and Kozma might react to his argument that some researchers promote a 'false equipotentiality' of technologies.
'It All Depends on Teachers': The Theories of Richard Clark
Clark lays out his basic position in Reconsidering Research on Learning from Media (1983). After reviewing research studies from 1912 to the early 1980s, he concludes that instructional designers gain no learning benefits from employing a specific medium to deliver instruction. Any performance or time saving gains researchers observe, he says, are the result of uncontrolled instructional methods or novelty.
Clark uses an analogy of a delivery truck to explain his position. Instructional media, he says, '�are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition' (p 445).
What then, influences learning? In Clark�s view, media, and the systems of symbols used with them provide 'operational vehicles for methods that reflect the cognitive processes necessary to perform a given learning task' ("