Teaching multimedia as a vocational discipline as a lot of difficulties and issues. An effective multimedia teacher as to be able give students a combination of skills,  which will  increase their chance in getting into both media and multimedia industry. At the same time they have to have knowledge of the industry sector, developments in the education sector, and developments in both technologies, software and programming.

It is indeed true the multimedia industry has issue with teachers and academia. But I am surely one teacher who is refusing using the tick the boxes techniques, and try to look forward so students don’t feel cheated once they leave me to go onto greater things.  They are many constrains established with teaching multimedia, these include:

• the range of specialist skills required to develop outstanding learning and teaching in this sector are not up to date, and making it difficult to provide students with good a experience
• developing formative and summative assignments that are matching the industry, job market needs and developments is difficult because the constrains and criteria set by different organisations
• ITC, software, hardware and programming skills are required to be able to teach effectively (multimedia)
• project Management skills are required to be able to teach effectively (multimedia)
• the multimedia sector is evolving by the day and making it difficult for teachers to keep up
• time spent on admin does not give a teachers any chance to develop good teaching material, because no individual has all of the skills required, and acquiring them requires considerable investments in time and effort
• Technical issues; hardware and software used in the class do not match industry standards

However, interactive multimedia design has evolved in the past seven years resulting in the developments such as youtube, which have a number of advantages, these include:

• cost-effectiveness;
• ease of use;
• no need to wast time in doing it yourself

The disadvantage of using them if you are a teacher are:

• What happens if a student ask you questions that are not answered in the free material you have used? You sound rather inexperienced and the student loose confidence in your ability to teach a specific skills.
• To find good resources you still have to spend a lot of screening and scanning

“Why bother to create something if it is to be stolen? … Why bother if I can’t own my own words and have that recognized throughout the world as my original creation? … Electronictexts can be used in secret by people thousands of kilometres away from their source. Even worse, they can be entered and altered, sabotaged…. so that no one may ever know it happened and how.”(McCalman1995, quoted in Weckert and Adeney 1997 p.57).

Based on the above a multimedia teacher should have a reference of standards they should adhere to when preparing learning material, and teaching;

• use technology-related terms, concepts, in teaching and learning
• make informed decisions about current technologies and their applications
• encourage students to solve problems (individually or in groups)
• encourage students to communicate  using different technologies/formats
• have a variety of strategies for acquiring free information from electronic resources (meaning just don’t copy and paste, understand the resource, and expend on knowledge acquired with the what if scenario, because students won’t like the fact that you don’t know what you preach)
• know how to plan, organize, deliver learning, and evaluate resources and technologies
• web design/animation/multimedia/video; be aware and have knowledge of technologies which are not template based to help students, understand this sector from foundation to advanced level.
• understand and help students understand ethics, issues in multimedia (Copyright, Education, Ethics, Law, Technical, safeguarding, intellectual property)
• know  a variety of software packages, and strategically enrich the curriculum by integrating them in the learning experience;-
  • office software,
  • animation software,
  • design software,
  • web design software,
  • telecommunications,
• Avoid using template base software, knowing that will not help your students that want to enter the multimedia market. They won’t stand a chance!!!!!!! Only use them as a way of communication, and not acquiring skills.
• If using template based software know the back end of it, so you can teach valuable skills, such as making templates (coding etc…)
• Be able to understand and teach initial stage and project management (researching, mind mapping, brainstorming etc…)

With teaching Web Design, I usually encourage students to use a free online  service so they can experience with industry standards such as wordpress. It will be a very handy skill; although this year we are not able to touch the php css…. I try two teach  main concepts CSS, HTML, WYSIWYG and CMS at level 1 & 2. At level 2 we look at php and javascript, experimenting with the back end of WordPress, Drupal and get away from template based, to understand web design from the source. But teaching back en technology becomes very tricky with lack of equipment and software.

Sample level 2 website (09/10)

• www.newham2012.com

Sample level 2 websites (10/11)

• www.newhamolympics.com, Kane is working on producing a website about the Olympics 2012
• designdesires.co.uk
• designdesires.co.uk/fatma Fatma is designing a website for a dj, she has done the structure and photo slide, but is waiting for information from her customer.
• Tola is a keen Photographer. You can visit her blog