Using Transmedia in Education

Abstract

The positive effects of student engagement and motivation on student learning, have been supported by a great deal of academic research (Carini, R. M., Kuh, G. D., & Klein, S. P. , 2006, Zhao, C.-M., & Kuh, G. D. , 2004, Christenson, S. L., Reschly, A. L., & Wylie, C. , 2012, and, Leah Taylor & Jim Parsons, 2016). Knowing that transmedia has been successful in creating engaging environments, some educators have been developing transmedia projects to improve student engagement and motivation in order to enhance learning (Weinreich N. K. , 2006 and Roth, C., Vorderer, P., & Klimmt, C. , 2009, Raybourn, E. M. , 2014). This paper describes how transmedia learning is viewed by different researchers, analyses the ways it is being practiced by educators, and discusses its strengths and its drawbacks. This paper also explains how a transmedia learning campaign can be developed. The study targets educators who we believe need to learn about transmedia learning, and find out about how they can develop effective transmedia learning projects.

Keywords: transmedia learning, student engagement, motivation, enhancing learning

Transmedia: definitions

Two definitions help explain what is meant by ‘using transmedia in education’. These two definitions been developed by two experts in the field, the media scholar Henry Jenkins III, and the research scientist, Elaine M Raybourn. The first definition is a general definition of transmedia, while the second is a specific definition of transmedia learning. Jenkins (2011) defines transmedia story telling as “the process where integral elements of the fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels, for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience”. It is clear from this definition that we cannot envision transmedia except as fiction which is narrated on different platforms and which aims at entertainment. Jenkins’ transmedia is a form of storytelling for entertainment.  So how can the concept of transmedia become related to training and pedagogy?

Focusing on education, Raybourn (2014) defines what she calls “transmedia learning”, as “the scalable system of messages that represents a narrative or core experience that unfolds from the use of multiple media, emotionally engaging learners by involving them personally in the story”. One can question whether transmedia learning, as defined by Raybourn, qualifies as a form transmedia - as defined by Jenkins. In fact, a ‘scalable system of messages that represents a narrative or core experience that unfolds from the use of multiple media’ is not necessarily a form of fiction; it is common knowledge that a narrative could be some account of actual events and that an experience is not a narrative.  Hence, Raybourn’s definition does not qualify, according to Jenkins, as being that of transmedia. However, one can argue that as consumers experience a fictional narrative, an actual realistic experience is actually unfolding. This means that Jenkins’ definition, which restricts transmedia to fiction, can be challenged. Without further elaboration on the definition, it is suitable for the objectives of this paper to adopt Raybourn’s definition.

Examples of successful transmedia narratives and franchises

Star Wars is perhaps the best example of a successful thriving transmedia narrative. It grew to become a whole digital world that is much larger than the original narrative; it became vastly shared and explored by consumers; it allowed for fan immersion and for fans to produce independent extensions. Star Wars was initially created by George Lucas in 1977 as a science fiction film about the adventures of some alien civilization in a faraway galaxy. Eventually many sequels followed and the narrative spread over many platforms including books, games, blogs, toys, and others. Star Wars fans developed “fan fiction, fan music, fan cinema, fan viding ( which is developing music videos from the original footage), thereby exploring the source itself in a new way, cosplay (costumed roleplaying), role play, and model-building”, Jenkins, H. (2015), and it eventually grew to become a “social phenomenon that belongs to the general public of fans and their participatory culture”.  Star Trek and The Matrix are other successful transmedia examples.

General features of transmedia narratives

A transmedia narrative may make use of blogs, social media internet games, and according to Jenkins (2010), “immersive simulations, intelligent tutoring systems, virtual environments, machinima (video or short films made with game technology), mobile learning, graphic novels, motion comics, film, radio, print, and social media”.  Jenkins summarises the core concepts of transmedia in his 2010 blog post Transmedia Education: the 7 Principles Revisited. According to Jenkins transmedia storytelling should motivate the consumer to share its content with others and on different platforms. The consumer also should be able to explore the content in depth, and according to their individual interest. Transmedia narratives may allow for alternative worlds or characters that can be created by fans; they are also extractable, which means the consumer can own, or take away, some item, toy, or resource that they keep or use. Transmedia would allow the consumer to become a part of the story; it would also allow for real world and digital extensions. Producers should expand the narrative at critical points thus creating interest and curiosity regarding what may happen next. The central narrative should be explorable from different perspectives, and through the eyes of different characters, who may or may not, belong to the core narrative. Jenkins description of transmedia narratives explains why they attract enormous fandom, create a lot of interest and motivation, and spread over media and over time.

The business of transmedia production

Transmedia learning can happen only if it is economically feasible and the economical, or business, part of transmedia production is at the root of its feasibility. Hence I feel that it is important to introduce it briefly. The text Getting Started with Transmedia Storytelling, Robert Pratten (2011), is a comprehensive resource that tackles thoroughly all aspects of transmedia production. Unit 8 of this text describes the procedure that Pratten suggests for setting the initial foundations of the production, namely building the initial audience and priming the project and its community for funding and financing thus explaining transmedia project production from the business and social perspectives. Pratten describes the preliminary steps and conditions of the first phase of the production.  During this phase the producers according to Pratten would start by creating and exhibiting low cost transmedia aiming at building and involving an initial audience.  Then he includes a repetitive loop that describes priming the initial audience and raising the inceptive funds. The last step in the repetitive loop is a decision making step, which will either direct the producer to go back to the start of the loop in order to enhance the size of the initial audience and financing, or to go ahead and leave the loop.  Next, the producer looks into the feasibility of producing a successful transmedia feature and decides whether to go ahead with it or not. Pratten’s text would be very helpful for educators who wish to embark on major transmedia productions.

How can pedagogy benefit from transmedia?

Educators can target specific learning attainment objectives through transmedia by developing narratives and worlds where the learning attainment targets form the canon. Such projects need to be spreadable over different media in order to capture students’ diverse interests and to allow them explore the elements of the learning target, to different depths, and in different dimensions, each individual student according to their inclinations and their readiness. Educational transmedia narratives should facilitate student immersion which enhances their learning; this can be catered for by producing a capturing feature and allowing students to interact with the characters and participate as characters who belong to this newly created virtual world. Students may also be allowed to develop splinter narratives within that world. In history, for example, the narrative could allow students to influence the result of a certain battle, or allow them to hear the voices of the people living the battle, so they can empathise with people who may come from other cultures, and who would have lived in older times. In the sciences students would be able to look into the effects of modifying the initial conditions of a certain event such as the angle at which a certain stone is thrown and observe how this change would modify what happens next and how the whole narrative may be modified. Controlling the initial angle of projection of a stone and its initial speed, or the strength of gravity, could form capturing experiences for students within the world of projectile physics. Within the same narrative, other physics phenomena can be explored. A transmedia narrative can incorporate any of the other academic dimensions in a similar manner such as science, economics and business, social studies, music and arts, coding, and so no.

The case for transmedia learning

In her article Transmedia Learning for More Effective Training and Education 2014, Raybourne upholds that “the human brain is wired to learn from stories” and proposes a method that “can be used to create transmedia learning story worlds”. She also asserts the importance of being able to track learners’ progress and how within a transmedia campaign can be done through data mining their social media and their decisions as they interact with the story. Her study compares and contrasts transmedia and serious games concluding that games fail to “adequately support self-paced learning outside of facilitated exercises” and “lack the ability to detect the users’ context and therefore cannot personalize instruction very well”. Raybourn emphasizes that transmedia is more accessible and more effective than other training and educational approaches.  The use of transmedia learning campaigns, according to Raybourn, is an innovative approach that can boost learners’ retention and help knowledge reinforcement as learners are able to access content continually, and almost ubiquitously, and also in a self-paced manner. This claim, Raybourn clarifies, has still to be substantiated by research.

Features of transmedia learning

According to Roth (2009) good stories generate curiosity, suspense, and engagement. Interactive story telling according to Roth, opens opportunities for the reader to participate in creating the setting, interact with the characters and influence the narrative. This makes readers experience through transmedia realistic and therefore enables the develop feelings of authenticity and ownership, more than what can be provided through learning games or other pedagogical paradigms. Roth here clearly concurs with Raybourn. Roth’s study concludes that transmedia enhances learning and makes it enjoyable.

McCarthy (2012) investigates the effects of the implementation of transmedia on education. McCarthy’s study uses standardised nationally-normed tests to compare the learning progress of two types of groups of preschoolers, experimental groups who used PBS transmedia educational apps and control groups who didn’t. McCarthy found evidence that the learning gains of the experimental groups exceeded those of their counterparts. It is important to note that the study also involved the parents of the experimental groups and found evidence that transmedia apps improved parents’ involvement and their ability to support their children’s learning. In my view however, many PBS apps do not qualify as transmedia though they are good multimedia learning resources. PBS apps do not create extendable worlds or charming fictitious characters.

In her essay Transmedia Play: Literacy Across Media (2013), Alper explains how important the resourcefulness, sociality, mobility, accessibility, and replayability of a transmedia production are for making it a successful transmedia learning campaign. Alper’s essay is an elaborate discussion of transmedia learning and is a very useful resource for educators.

Raybourn’s Simulation Experience Design Method:

Raybourn developed a methodology for transmedia production for education and labeled it the Simulation Experience Design Method. The method is cyclical and starts with deciding how the learners will interact with the characters of the narrative and focus on developing likable characters that the learner can emotionally bond with. Next according to Raybourn the producers should develop a narrative that serves as the story through which the learners will explore concepts that they need to learn. The narrative needs to be realistic so that the learners find them easy to connect with. Learners should be given the opportunity to explore the narrative as it unfolds through different media such as mobile devices, radio, blogs or printed material. The framework should allow the learner to participate in the creation of the narrative’s scenarios. The project should next focus on reflection aiming at developing a culture that holds the new knowledge and skills that the learners acquire. Feedback follows and allows for performance assessment. Raybourn also encourages the incorporation of social media activity tracking and data mining in order to track learners’ experience. According to Raybourn (2104) “Transmedia learning campaigns are the purposeful, coordinated, scalable” and “represent a unique opportunity to transform serious games and other tools for education and training from stand-alone learning instances into complete training experiences that transcend time and any one medium”. What Raybourn seems to have missed however, is to mention that at the essence of a transmedia campaign is for the educator to define the main objective of the learning experience; i.e. what educators call learning intentions. The targeted learning intentions form the main pivotal dynamic of a learning transmedia narrative.

Important Issues and questions

How small can a transmedia learning campaign be; is it more pedagogically effective to build a large number of small independent narratives or a smaller number of larger ones? How does effectivity vary with the size of the narrative? What skills would enable a teacher produce a transmedia lesson? Does every teacher have to be a talented story teller for them to be able to use transmedia in their teaching? Do teachers need to learn coding in order to be able to use transmedia for their classroom? Do these ‘required’ skills form unsurmountable difficulties for teachers or is it possible to find ways to overcome them? What type of teacher education would be best for the constantly changing paradigm? There are definitely many more questions that educators will be discovering and researching as their transmedia learning endeavours develop.

Available tools

Educators can use the tool called Conducttr that allows even beginners to produce transmedia projects. Conducttr lets the teacher/narrator to produce interactive media scenarios where students’ responses influence the progress of the narrative, hence allowing for setting conditions that guide learning. The website http://www.conducttr.com/training/teach/ provides on hands training to teachers. The website firstly directs teachers to develop a transmedia project called ‘Saving Alice’, as a training example. This project, once developed by the trainee, would define a character called Alice who seeks help from students by sending them media messages and directing them as to how they can help her. Once they act, students would have interacted with Alice and with her environment. Students immediately become secondary characters who influence the progress of the narrative. A student’s success in satisfying a certain condition, which would be related to what they need to learn or practice, would save Alice from some predicament. The narrative then would continue to target further learning quests. Conducttr’s Alice interacts with students through text messages, preprogrammed phone calls, tweets, etc. which makes the experience feel very realistic. The program can track students’ progress and keep records that can be used as feedback.  Saving Alice is just an example that the Conducttr site uses to train beginners. Once confident, teachers should be able to produce their own Conducttr based transmedia learning campaigns.

Another transmedia production tool available for teachers is called Unity. Unity is a powerful media game production set of tools that teachers can use to produce transmedia teaching projects. Unity ninja is a community where one can get help, share ideas, etc. I will not elaborate further about the available tools for as I am write new tools are being produced.

Alice in Digitland: Inanimate Alice as compared to Alice in Wonderland

In his article in Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen, edited by Adams, R., Gibson, S., & Arisona, S. M. (2008), K. Pullinger explains on page 122 that he developed Inanimate Alice as a marketing campaign project that was commissioned by Ian Harper. The project narrates the stories of Alice, a games animator, and Brad the digital character who she created. Pullinger seems to have called his lead character Alice, after Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The similarities between Lewis Carrol’s Alice and Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice are striking. In both narratives each Alice embarks on adventures where one of them goes through experiences in an imaginary wonderland and the other experiences a digital world. Both Alices find themselves in situations that are frequently undesirable, in foreign settings or alien environments. Both feel uneasy about their experiences and try to attend to the problems they encounter. In both narratives Alice starts as a child and grows up through the chapters or episodes to become an adult. It is highly unlikely that all these similarities are accidental; in fact it is very justifiable for Pullinger to have pulled Alice from Carrol’s wonderland to his Digitland. Pullinger has built on the already existing endemic priming of world audiences: Alice of Wonderland is a very well known character who has been invading families’ homes for centuries. Alice in Wonderland is trusted by parents and by teachers and is liked by children. Pullinger constructed his new brand on top of an existing brand and hence he abridged a major starting underpinning of the project.

More about Inanimate Alice

While watching Inanimate Alice you cannot but feel an eerie message that Pullinger may have not meant; or that he may have not included consciously; Alice in alien land feels lonely, fearful and vulnerable. No society is around her; it is just her parents and her. She sometimes reaches for a tutor who comes from another culture, but very briefly. The tutor however sounds remote and cannot extend help; she neither expresses any form of empathy. From this angle, as an educator, I would not endorse the project for school children as it does not agree with what I see as a major duty that we build trust between cultures; Inanimate Alice seems to have the opposite effect on me.

On the other hand, inanimate Alice is a most successful project. One of the reasons for Inanimate Alice’s successes is the ambiguity that revolves around Alice; we neither see her face nor hear her voice. This ambiguity leaves a lot of room for imagination and is definitely very intriguing and capturing. However, this element which contributed to the success of the narrative was in fact only accidentally introduced by the producer. Pullinger admits that “we had no money to hire actors, so could not represent Alice’s face or record her voice” (Adams, Gibson and Arisona, 2008, p. 122).

In order to make room for children’s contribution to the narrative, and to enrich the variety of cultural content, the episodes are not linearly continuous, settings in different episodes jump from one country to another, from one continent to another. Alice grows up very quickly. It feels as if the episodes that have been produced so far, should not have been labelled as episodes number one, number two, number three etc. but probably as episodes number one, number eight, number sixteen, etcetera, leaving room for conducers to contribute the missing episodes as Alice would that way grow up gradually. Clearly, the producers wanted to capture the wider temporal and spacial spans and then either fill in the gaps, or provide space for conducers to do so. In fact, there are plenty of conducer produced episodes that cover cultures not tackled by the original production.

The sound effects and the filming add to the eeriness of the narratives and successfully create feelings of suspense. Alice the character feels very realistic to the viewer, though we never see her face or figure, or even hear her voice.  The character reminds me of many of my younger students and the young children around me, the way they think, the way they express themselves, how they assess matters, and how they approach their issues.  Definitely, the producers have been very successful in portraying a very realistic lovable character that probably every one of us can identify with. We never see Alice’s mum or dad, however the family still feels realistic, and their problems are very common among expatriates abroad.

In her article Tips for Using Inanimate Alice in the Classroom, Laura Fleming calls it a teaching epiphany and says that her students gave standing ovations at the ends of episodes. She maintained that it motivated them to read and be more engaged than they used to be when they read ebooks or print. Fleming accounts for this referring to Transmedia’s ability to allow for user action to drive the narrative forward, and for the fact that complexity increases with episodes. Fleming, says that after she discovered Inanimate Alice, she aligned it with the USA National Curriculum standards.

Inanimate Alice, the transmedia production has very wide active fandom in the educational circles. The producers have developed a Facebook page, and have produced with every episode a teacher’s edition, a music pack, and other educational material.

Regarding Planning

Inanimate Alice was planned as a promotion campaign for another larger project; it was not preplanned to target learning. It entered the arena of education only after it was t was discovered and used by educators for the purpose. Though its success is to be commended, there is a lot missing, for as it was not purposely preplanned to target learning, educators are having to mold the project in a manner that makes it useful in class and this would not always succeed. This matter reminds me of teachers who try to make some mathematics or science concepts appear realistic and useful, but end up forging scenarios that are viewed by children as fake and artificial. As an example of this would be a question that applies the concept of fractions such as; Alex purchased a pizza and would like to divide it into two parts such that one part is five times the other. Now who on Earth would use fractions if encountered with a similar situation? Children who encounter such experiences deduce that their views of the irrelevance of what they are learning are being confirmed, so they lose trust in academic settings and in the school system.

However, starting from what children like and appreciate and then taking them on an enjoyable learning trip full of surprise, suspense and fun, would definitely capture their interest and create engagement. Inanimate Alice succeeds in that part of the mission. The difference however, is that educators need to have been involved from the start if the project was to be a pedagogical project. Their initial involvement would have allowed the project to cater for STEM subjects more authentically. But the project was initially a promotional project for an Art production. Inanimate Alice however, remains an excellent contribution to a new genre of literature; digital writing or literature, which is excellent to use in class for learning about literature concepts such as setting, character development, theme, etc. It is also very useful when teachers use it to encourage learners to participate in the production of new episodes and be creative, and to learn about media and culture. Though a major success Inanimate Alice, the project, falls short of being a well-planned comprehensive transmedia learning campaign that can target learning intentions other than the ones mentioned above.

A brief transmedia learning plan

I am going to rely mainly on Raybourn and Pratten to describe a plan for a transmedia learning production. I will also rely on the document that was provided to me by Dr. Anna Jackson and that outlines the steps of developing a plan for a transmedia project. I will describe a plan for a science transmedia learning production drawing on my personal experience as an educator, a teacher trainer, and as a teacher of science and mathematics.

The objective of the proposed project is for the students of primary to achieve the learning intentions about speed and how it relates to distance and time.  These learning intentions depend on prior knowledge that one would hope that students of lower primary classes would have learnt: such as how to read time, what the units of time are, how to measure distance and what its units are. The unit also requires some arithmetic knowledge mainly those of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Such basic prerequisites are very essential and should not be assumed, otherwise some students may fail to learn the new concepts due to gaps in their background. In order to cater for individual differences, it is essential to create a prerequisite revision unit about time, distance and simple arithmetic operations. However, for the purposes of brevity I would focus only on the main unit assuming that the prerequisite work has been catered for.

Hence the targeted learning intentions are: what is speed, how it relates to time and distance, what are the units we use for speed (meters per hours, centimeters per second or any distance unit per time unit), what instruments do we use, and what problems we may encounter in our daily lives that require that we learn about speed. The students also need to develop the ability to actually measure speed in simple experiments and read speed on speedometers.

The audience should not be restricted to students; parents and teachers are major stakeholders in the process of child education; hence the production needs to cater for these three groups.

Producing the project can be done using Conducttr (http://www.conducttr.com/training/teach/)  or Unity (https://unity3d.com/education). Both platforms include support and training units for beginners and have been used in educational productions.

Relying on what I have written about the reasons for the success of inanimate Alice, I believe that starting with a well-established ‘brand’ and previously established and well known characters would enhance the success of the project. However, the original narrative should be able to cater for the learning aims. Aesop’s fable The Hare and the Tortoise would be a good choice to re-produce in transmedia format. Aesop’s original fable is about a race between a hare and a tortoise in which the tortoise eventually wins due to its perseverance, while the hare loses due to its complacency.  So in addition to the science learning intentions the chosen story has a moral. The fable has been narrated by many and in different forms and through different media.

A most interesting production is on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoYQ97h0xGA. It consists of four different scenarios that teach different morals. The first scenario is that of the original fable where the tortoise wins the race; the moral is “slow and steady wins the race”. In the second scenario, however, the hare has learnt the lesson not to be complacent, and it runs steadily and wins the race; the moral in this version is “fast and consistent will always beat slow and steady”. In the third scenario, the tortoise changes the route to include water and so now it wins the race and the moral becomes “change the playing field to suit your competency”. Then the hare and the tortoise discover that if they cooperate and carry each other during the different terrains they can be even faster, as they can go at the hare’s speed when on land and at the tortoise’s speed when in water; they cover the route that combines land and water successfully and quickly. The moral here becomes that through teamwork you can overcome your shortcomings.  The differences in scenarios allow lots of rooms to different types of questions related to speed such as the tortoises speed in water compared to its speed on land, or the speed of the hare when it stopped as it encountered the water, etc.

The project can be introduced through a blog on which there is a link to the above video. On the same first page of the blog the character of the hare can be presented. It would introduce itself and explains to the students how they can control its motion by drag and drop methods. Beside the hare, the students can see a stop watch that shows the time it takes the hare to run from the beginning of its path till the end. Students would be asked to record the time they read on the stopwatch and can repeat the animation as many times as they need until they learn how to read and record the time on a stop watch accurately. The distance the hare moves can also be controlled by the student by sliding the starting position or the final position in either direction. A ruler that they can drag and drop, and position in the correct place, will allow them to measure the distance. Every time the student runs the animation, she can read the distance and the time and record them in specific cells. If they are recorded accurately the program calculates speed and displays it in a cell that is aligned with the other two quantities. Students get points accumulated for their successful attempts of recording time and distance and the hare reacts with animated encouragement. Eventually the program stops calculating the speed and requires that the students to calculate it. The tortoise would compete with them and do the calculation in order to create some challenge. If they make mistakes one of the characters would disappear and they have to try to discover which keyboard key brings it back to the screen by trial and error. Once a student logs off the hare sends them an email thanking them and summarising their attempts and informing them about the number of points they managed to get during the session.  Students are told that they can become silver card holders or gold card holders depending on the speed and accuracy of their performance. The promotion from one card to the higher gives them access to further adventures.

The tortoise would for example secretly send an email to the students seeking their help to win a race. Here they need to do calculations where they use their newly learnt skill in order to position the tortoise at a point where it can win. The students would be rewarded by having their photo added to an animation where they are represented by avatars; they would compete for virtual Olympic running races. Primary students are not at ages which allow them to use Facebook, however other digital media can be added to the project. The narrative can be modified by the students as they improve their experience so that they can go deeper into studying further speed related concepts such as displacement, velocity and acceleration, and related graphs.

The project would be active for a term at a time and would have extensions that guide students as they move from one level to the next to include more complex speed related concepts. It can also include an on line bog page that includes photos of the fastest birds, animals, jet planes, rockets etc. and their speeds. It would also contain actual Olympic and world speed records information. The same blog may also include information about the slowest moving animals such as snails and sloths.

Cards and posters of objects and animals and their speeds can be printed by the students form the blog page. The project would include a database where the learning progress records of students are kept and are continuously updated. The records should be available to students, parents and teachers to explore, discuss and look into, as feedback is essential. A teachers’ module is needed to provide tools that help teachers build further upon the project and participate. Parents education is very important for healthy learning-conducive home environments, hence the project would also include a parents’ module so that parents could join their children in the fun-activity-learning process and provide home support.

Conclusion

Having explored the different resources, and building on my experience as an educator, I would endorse Pratten’s Transmedia Business Model 2011, as a main reference for any transmedia course and build a curriculum around it, as it provides the learners with a comprehensive thorough transmedia production description. I would also include in the course some purposely built transmedia production that introduces the elements of transmedia through some interactive narrative, where the students become involved as conducers and as critics.

Current students are digital natives and they need to be addressed through media that they appreciate. They also live in very distracting environments and hence they need approaches that can capture their interest and motivate them. Storytelling and social interaction, even within virtual environments, have proved to be successful ways to engage learners. Teachers and schools need to acquire the skills that enable them do their teaching preparation using digital means, such as transmedia narratives, or whatever the digital future may come up with. Transmedia projects or campaigns allow teachers to lead learning, capture feedback and attend to learner’s individual differences.

References

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Betsy McCarthy, Ph.D., Linlin Li, Ph.D., & Michelle Tiu. (n.d.). PBS KIDS Mathematics Transmedia Suites in Preschool Homes. Retrieved from http://www-tc.pbskids.org/lab/media/pdfs/WestEd-HomeStudy-PBSKids-full.pdf

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