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Interactive videodisc
 

Setting Up an Interactive Videodisc Project

Robert G. Fuller

Context:
The author gives a thorough description of the process of producing an interactive videodisc. He describes the tasks of selecting the content, estimating the costs, organizing and managing the development team, and choosing the hardware and software for the project.

Source:
Fuller, Robert G. 1987. "Setting Up an Interactive Videodisc Project." In Diana Laurillard, ed., Interactive Media: Working Methods and Practical Applications. Chichester: Ellis Horwood Ltd., pp. 15-27.

Copyright:
Reproduced with permission.

1. 1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter contains hints and recommendations about interactive videodisc projects based on my experiences with six different interactive videodisc projects from 1979 to the present. All of these projects produced videodisc-based physics lessons intended for university students. The video images on these discs include such varied scenes as archival film of a bridge collapse, a television trial about blind teddy bears, fixed camera pictures of performing gymnasts, and vibrating string experiments in a physics laboratory setting. The interactivity levels of the various lessons include Level I (designed for stand-alone use of a videodisc player using chapters), Level 2 (lesson branch points are coded into the videodisc and read into the memory of a Level 2 player), and Level 3 (computer graphics are overlaid onto the videodisc images and the control of the lesson is managed by computer software).

I am a physicist whose professional career, since the early 1970s, has incre asingly overlapped into areas of science education and instructional technology. Before I started my first videodisc project in 1979, I had produced single concept films for physics instruction, taught large lecture recitation sections of introductory college physics classes, used self-paced, mastery-based instruction for three different levels of college physics courses, and developed a Piagetian-based physics course for non-science, first-year college students. As a part of my work with these areas of physics instruction I led a number of faculty development workshops to teach other faculty members about these different teaching strategies.

Each of the interactive videodisc projects with which I have been involved has been developed by a production team. Sometimes the team was a specific group with each person having well defined tasks. Other times the production team featured a variety of changing personnel and tasks were assigned or made-up as the project went along.

All of the projects vi ewed the videodisc lessons as a means to not only enhance the science knowledge base of the learners but also as a way to encourage them to improve their use of scientific reasoning. These lessons were influenced by my own belief in a constructivist view of learning as espoused by Jean Piaget, William Perry and others. While we have generally followed the precepts of the reinforcement theory of learning we have not been deceived by thinking that training a person to carry out repetitive tasks is sufficient for improved problem solving. As a result the learner may come to the end of some of our interactive videodisc lessons with a haunting sense of a lack of closure. For example, if you work completely through The Puzzle of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse videodisc (Fuller et al., 1982), some three hours after you have started, you will find yourself confronted with the task of constructing for yourself, from the various experiences you have had with the disc, your own explanation of why t he bridge collapsed. Hopefully, these interactive science learning experiences will encourage people to wonder about nature. A sense of wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

1.2 SHOULD YOU USE INTERACTIVE VIDEO AT ALL?

Not every educational task merits the use of interactive video. Just because the videodisc will allow you to put a high quality video image with stereo sound on the screen of a television monitor in an educational setting does not mean that it is appropriate in all instructional settings. I personally favour the videodisc for many of the educational tasks now done with 35 mm slides and 16 mm films, but I happen to see the functions of those media as interactive modes of group instruction if they are to be effective in enhancing learning. Typical show-and-tell presentations do not need the features of a videodisc and are very adequately done using a videotape/video projector, or 35 mm slides/projector system. Before you begin an interactive video project you need to evaluate your reasons for wanting to do such a project.

There are two essential questions, I think, that you need to consider before you begin an interactive video project—how can interaction with a video image enhance the learning environment of this lesson? and how can this interaction increase the students' active learning? If you are unable to give compelling answers to these two questions, then interactive video is likely to not be the appropriate medium for your lesson. Notice that both of these questions focus your attention on the activity of the learner rather than on the content of the lesson. I think it is important to begin by focusing your attention on how the learner will interact with the totality of the video lesson rather than on what video images you will provide.

1.3 SELECTION OF CONTENT

The structure of the discipline you wish to teach from your lessons will help you to select the visual content of your videodisc lessons.

In physics we ha ve a good list of possible criteria for selection based upon the 1976 Millikan Lecture given by Professor Franklin Miller, Jr. In Professor Miller's lecture, 'A Long Look at the Short Film' (1970), he suggests several reasons for using single concept films to teach physics:

  • the phenomenon is too small to be easily seen by a group, e.g. the magnetic domain microstructure of a crystal.
  • the phenomenon is too large to be shown in a classroom setting, e.g. a sphere dropped from the mast of a moving ship.
  • the phenomenon is too fast to be easily seen. e.g. the recoil of a rifle upon firing a bullet.
  • the phenomenon is too slow to be conveniently used in a typical instructional setting, e.g. radioactive decay of long lifetime can be shown using time-lapse photography.
  • the phenomenon is too hazardous to be used with a group, e.g. a high
  • pressure critical temperature experiment.
  • the phenomenon is a rare event, e.g. the launch of the lunar lander from the moon.
  • the phenomenon is to o uncertain to be easily used with a group, e.g.
  • many electrostatic phenomena depend upon a dry atmosphere to be observed.
  • the equipment needed to show the phenomenon is not readily available,
  • e.g. the behaviour of liquid helium at 3°K.
  • the presentation of the phenomenon can be aided by graphics overlay,
  • e.g. a sine wave on top of an oscillating mass.
  • the students can quantitatively analyse the phenomenon by taking data directly from the video image on a monitor, e.g. plot the centre of mass of a diver during a high dive into a swimming pool.

Professor Miller's reasons for using single concept films in physics teaching provide us with clues as to the type of images that may make good videodisc lessons.

Similar criteria can be developed for your discipline and can be useful in suggesting to you ideas for the content, or visual images, that you want to put in your interactive videodisc lesson:

  • You may have an instructional task that you have not been able to do satisfactorily using traditional media, e.g. film a gymnast for use in a physics class where it can be shown in slow motion for quantitative analysis.
  • You have some excellent visual material that you would like to convert into an interactive lesson, e.g. the archival film footage of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
  • You may have a linear sequence of video material that, because of its non-interactive nature, did not seem to be as effective as you wished, e.g. the 'Eve for an Eye' television programme for the materials science course of The Open University.
  • You may want to provide real world visual images to motivate students to study the subject, e.g. motion sequences of aircraft for air-force cadets to analyse using Newton's laws of motion.

Begin your work on the content of your videodisc lessons with some brainstorming sessions to make lists of all the possible visual images that might be useful to help students become involved in your lessons.

1.4 STARTING AN INTERAC TIVE VIDEODISC PROJECT

There is no substitute for hands-on experience with interactive video. If you are serious about creating an interactive videodisc lesson you must go somewhere and play with someone else's interactive videodisc system and work at least part way through someone else's lesson. Again, I repeat, there is no substitute for concrete experience with this technology! Everyone has their own personal preferences about how interactive lessons should work. You need to develop your own style. If you have not spent a few hours just playing with some interactive videodisc material, please set this book aside and do that! Turn on the frame display number of the videodisc player so you can see where you are on the videodisc as you go through the lesson and become aware of the structure of the information on the disc. A part of every videodisc lesson design is the decision about what video material to put where on the disc. You need to see how some other people have done it. You need to ha ve some concrete experience with videodisc lessons before you continue planning.

You also need to read some of the how-to-do-it materials in other books about interactive video. The Handbook of Interactive Video (Floyd and Floyd, 1982) includes a chapter by Patric McEntree that goes through the steps of producing interactive video programs. In a similar way, The Videodisc Book, A Guide and Directory (Daynes and Butler, 1984) has several chapters on videodisc design and production. A good resource on the technical information about interactive technologies is the book Interactive Video (Parsloe, 1983). The more information you have before you start, based on the experiences of others, the fewer common mistakes you will repeat.

Find someone who has already worked on a complete interactive video project to be part of your working group. There is no substitute for real experience in this business. Try to find a person who has done part of a project and participated actively in the whole project from beginning to end, from the start of the idea through the post-production stretch to the instructional use finish line. This technology has its own jargon and concepts, e.g. field dominance, 3–2 pull down, white flags, frame jitter, etc., that will be important in the quality of your final product. It is better to work with someone who already knows about these kinds of issues. I discovered a case of mind-boggling stupidity that illustrates the importance of doing adequate preparation before you begin an interactive video-project and of having the courage to ask experienced persons for help and advice. The following classic case of self-satisfied ignorance illustrates this point. A group of academics, in a country and institution that shall remain nameless, were invited to bring their institution into the interactive video generation.

After some study of the field, they decided that interactive videodiscs were too expensive (a false economy of decision-making, to which I will turn later) so they proceeded to produce an interactive videotape lesson. They also ordered a videotape player to use in their classrooms. Since it was obtained by a bidding process, they obtained the best of the mono soundtrack videotape players. This group of academics had overlooked the fact that to do interactive video with tape you must put the frame location data on the second sound-track, so when you ask the controlling computer to look for a particular frame or motion sequence it can use audio information on the second sound-track. Many hours of academic thinking time later this group has an interactive lesson on videotape that can be silent with flexible access to the images or that can have sound with a very slow searching system. Such obvious mistakes are easily avoided if you seek the help of someone who has experience with interactive video already. Warning: beware of those in this field who talk much about it but really have not done much. The unexpected booby traps in this business seem to hunt down the inexperienced. Seek and get advice from experienced others!

1.5 HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

You need to arrange for enough financial support to be able to complete the project, at least through to the production of some discs. After you have completed the production of the videodisc you can arrange to work on the interactive software a little bit at a time. Until you get your disc produced there is no great need for you to finish your software lessons. How much money do you need? I have been involved in projects that have cost from a few thousand US dollars to about two hundred thousand dollars. I have recently heard rumours about costs of six hundred thousand dollars per lesson. What the total cost will be depends upon the services you have to hire. You will need to pay a manufacturer a videodisc set-up charge, that is about $2000, and then about $10 per copy of the disc. I recommend that you make at least 100 copies of your disc. Even if you do not plan to sell them you will be surprised at the number of educators who will want a copy of your disc in the next few years. Some of the projects in the early years only made about ten copies of their discs. So few copies makes it extremely difficult for other developers to see your disc and learn from it. Anyway, 100 copies means a minimum cost of about US $3000, only $30 per disc. There are some companies that are beginning to specialise in interactive videodiscs for education and that are willing to share some of the production costs in return for the right to sell the discs to educational institutions. For our least expensive project we used nearly all pre-existing film that was available from government or public service companies. The new video scenes were made using a university videotape team. The pre-mastering, converting everything to 1 inch videotape master, was done in a university media centre at no cost. The narrator was a student. The complete master tape, ready to be sent off to a videodisc m astering company, had cost less than $300 assuming that the professional time of the authors is not counted. This brings me back to the comment that I made in the previous section. Many groups that get into the interactive video business are used to the usual academic way of developing new courses and curricula. Those development tasks are assigned to various faculty members and the development of the course or curriculum is an assumed part of their professional work. There is never any financial accounting made of the cost in professional time that is committed to the new course or curriculum. Academic groups tend to approach interactive video lessons in the same way and stumble over the minimum cost of about $3000 to master any reasonable number of discs. So they may turn to what they see as a less expensive medium, video-tape. Do not be deceived. The professional development time/cost is much, much greater than any of the costs associated with the production and mastering of the video material!< /I> At The Open University the academic cost of a video lesson is about seven times the television production cost. For the interactive video lessons on which I have worked the professional design and development time has had a financial value about ten times the costs of the production, pre-mastering, and mastering of the discs and lessons. The point is that if you really want to do effective interactive video and expect to spend a reasonable amount of time trying to do the best lessons that you can, then do not be pound foolish and pence wise and opt for the least expensive production and distribution technology. The professional development costs will be so much greater than the production costs that you should provide your lessons with the highest quality distribution technology that you can. Of course, much of that professional cost can come out of your professional flesh. You can do videodisc lessons instead of your other professional work and the time you use on these lessons can be stolen from other tasks that you have to do. That is even more reason to make sure that you take care of all the work you have done and give your interactive lessons the best chance for success. Today, the best is interactive videodiscs. Use it. You need to make sure that you have enough financial backing to pay for the real costs that you will incur. You will need from US $3000 on up. Then you will have at least one hundred copies of your own videodisc and a chance to develop the interactive lessons for it. We estimate that it takes us about 1000 person-hours to conceive, script, and produce the interactive lessons that use one side of a videodisc, about three hours of learner time.

To summarise this section let me cite my own experience. My first disc project was supported by the National Science Foundation for a total of US $60,000 which included the purchase of three equivalent sets of videodisc hardware (and that was back when the players cost $2500 each!). I worked on this project with two other physics educators quite experienced in the production and use of single concept 8 mm films for physics teaching. All of the original video material and the post-production work was done with the Nebraska Videodisc Design/Production group which had already produced nine videodiscs by the time they began to work with us. Even so we have made our share of blunders in our proof disc, e.g. flicker stills when the two scan down fields of the same video image are different, wrong audio when the narration does not match the image, and dead-end loops where the 'go to' instructions in the video image send the viewer to a non-existent disc location. We managed to correct or compensate for all of those errors in the final published version of the disc. We ended up with a level two videodisc of which we are proud, the first commercially available interactive videodisc specifically designed for classroom use, The Puzzle of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse (Fuller et al., 1982).

1. 6 ORGANISING AN INTERACTIVE VIDEODISC PROJECT?

You must organise the interactive videodisc project so that it will operate effectively in the institutional environment in which you find yourself. The structure of your project team needs to fit your institution and enable you to accomplish the tasks required to complete the project.

You will notice that I use the word team. I have never done a complete interactive videodisc project completely by myself. I consider such an approach unwise. Interactive video is not a single person technology. The poorest quality videodisc project with which I have been involved was the one in which we had the least help from other persons. Plan to organise a project team to accomplish the specific tasks discussed below. If you favour the 'single creative teacher dispels the ignorance of the learner' model of instruction, do something else rather than interactive video. Both you and the world will be better served.

Your project team needs to be able to accomplish a variety of tasks, so you need to make sure that you have the expertise on your team to get them all done correctly (and punctually, if you are working against a production deadline). Your interactive video lesson will need content, instructional design and evaluation, interactive software, and video images. You need to make sure that these four aspects of the project can be carried out by your team.

Content Some people on the team need to be very familiar with the content to be taught by the interactive video lessons. If the content specialists have taught the lesson content in typical educational settings, then you can use their experience to design more effective interactive learning activities. We had all had classroom and laboratory experience teaching the physics of standing waves on vibrating ropes before we started the Tacoma Narrows Bridge videodisc. It was on the basis of that experience that we chose the ropes, weights, and lengths to show on the disc. I am now helping script a Science of Flight videodisc. Five physicists who are experienced pilot instructors are serving as content consultants. I find no adequate substitute for the experience of having taught the concepts with live students as a basis for the design of a videodisc lesson.

Instructional design and evaluation Your interactive lessons will be best if they follow some overall instructional plan. Evaluation of your lessons can help you make better lessons in the future. The evaluation of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge lessons showed that the seven minute opening documentary film of the collapse was an excellent motivator for the students and most of them worked through the remaining two to three hours of material on the disc to try to solve the puzzle of the bridge collapse. On the other hand. we designed the Studies In Motion disc (Zollman and Fuller, 1983) to begin with a ballet which had impossible, 'trick' motions done by the dancer. When the disc was fin ally done there were three trick notions in about four minutes of ballet. The evaluation of the disc by students showed that the opening ballet failed to puzzle them enough to interest them in the later parts of the lesson. Fortunately, the subsequent motions of divers and gymnasts proved to he high in intrinsic interest and the students readily studied those portions of the disc. As a result, a disc, presently under development, on the physics of sports goes straight to the sports action scenes.

If some of the people on your team are experienced in instructional and video screen design they can help keep the various parts of the lessons working towards common instructional goals and help with the evaluation of your project. One important aspect of interactive video is the design of the individual frames. At which location on the monitor screen is the main action shown? Where and what size letters can you overlay onto that action?

Interactive software Some members of your team need t o be familiar with the capability of the computers and languages that you will be using for delivering and authoring your interactive lessons. If they have had previous experience with interactive lessons they can be a valuable resource for the team. Good computer ideas can overcome weaknesses in your video materials. On the Teddy Bear disc (Williams et al., 1984) the student applies increasing tension on a steel rod in the tensile testing machine using the > arrow key on the computer. When the rod exceeds its elastic limit, the software puts the videodisc into the play mode and the rod snaps with a loud noise. The visual images on this section of the disc are not very exciting, a steel rod between two clamps and a line on a piece of graph paper, but the dynamic interaction between the input of the student and the final breaking of the rod, with its accompanying loud sound, draws students into the lesson content. From one point of view interactive video is computer-based education illustrated with video images.

Video images Some people should have experience with both educational television and videodisc production. They will have the important task of making sure that the video content you want on the disc can be done effectively and in ways appropriate to a videodisc. Your interactive lesson can feature stills, computer overlays, and television special effects. Good television advice is essential. Outstanding visual images can motivate students to study even the most pedantic subjects. The parabolic motion of an object projected into the air near the surface of the earth seems to be much more interesting when it is the body of a gymnast, or a diver, and can be shown both forward and backward in time. From this point of view your video lesson is outstanding television images enhanced by interactive computer software.

How many people you will need on your team and who they are will be determined by the interests and abilities of the people you have available. On several of our projects the academic content specialists served as the instructional designers, evaluators, and software developers. The only additional expertise we used was from television specialists. In retrospect those projects suffered from the lack of video input from the beginning and some of the video sequences failed to achieve our instructional goals.

I believe that the best interactive video projects on which I have worked have been those that were carried out by a course team modelled after the Open University structure. In those cases the different functions that need to be done for an interactive video project are represented by different people. All of them were involved, more or less, from the beginning of the projects and all of them were able to make suggestions about the structure, content, flow, production, and evaluation of the interactive lesson as the project developed. While this did mean that the content specialists lost some of their control of the final product the interactive lesson that resulted was probably better than it might have otherwise been. Also, in those particular projects all of the members of the project had had previous experience with interactive lessons or interactive video. On such a project team there is a great deal of expertise and an exceptionally good project is most likely to occur.

Most universities are organised into quite separate departments. There is not very much co-operation among members of the various parts of the university. In these circumstances putting together an interdisciplinary project team may be quite difficult and using content specialists and video consultants might be your best choice. If you intend to get into the interactive video production business on a continuing basis then I strongly recommend that you try to construct an interdisciplinary team of professionals that can work together for several years on a number of different projects.

Finally, the issue of control will have to be faced. Who decides exactly what view and images are in each video scene? Who decides what the computer messages say? Who decides what content is included and what is omitted from the lesson? Interactive video raises to a higher level the importance of each individual frame of video and computer material. This new importance for each frame makes every decision more important, i.e. do you fade or dissolve from one scene to the next? do you use a narrator or let the computer text carry the storyline? can you use trick video images to provoke inquiry on the part of the learner or will interactive computer dialogue work best? etc. For many of these decisions there may be no correct answers. What is decided will be worked out in the give and take of the control of the project team. How your project finally turns out may be more influenced by who had the control of the project rather than by what makes the best lesson. Be prepared to be involved in a professional power struggle. Work for what you think will make the best project but reco gnise that in the end you may not have the power to make it happen the way you want. If you do not work well in situations where professionals disagree with one another about what should be done then you had better not work in interactive video.

1.7 CHOOSING HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE FOR THE PROJECT

Your materials should be authored on the most powerful and most flexible system that you can afford. The best projects of mine have had the software developed on mainframe computers and delivered on micros using a standard high-level language like Pascal. On several of my projects the computers that we were going to use to deliver the lessons to the students were also the machines that we used for authoring. This tends to limit the size of the interactive lesson that you can write. Today the greatest changes are occurring more rapidly in microcomputers than in the videodisc players. All of the main videodisc players are nearly the same. So the choice of what computer to use is more difficult to m ake. It seems to me that high resolution computer graphics that can overlay onto the video are a minimum requirement. A two screen system with multi-tasking for the computer would seem to offer you the best of both worlds. The computer screen can show the student any message you wish, such as the table of contents and the actual location of the student in the overall structure of the lesson, while at the same time delivering interactive materials on a combined videodisc/computer graphics screen. I have had experience with two different projects that made excellent use of the two screens. The first was a physics lesson in which the students were using the computer cursor on the video images to obtain the time, x-location, and y-location of a gymnast during her vault. The computer screen was used to display a spreadsheet page on which the numerical data were shown each time a cursor location was entered. The students had the ability to decide what data to collect by looking at their spreadsheet numerical results or at the dots on the video screen. This use of two screens seemed superior to our earlier use of a single screen where the students toggled back and forth between the video image and a spreadsheet. A second case is the interactive instructor workstation that we are developing at the US Air Force Academy. In addition to the computer overlay/video colour monitor that can be viewed by the students, the instructor will have access to a monochrome screen that will show the lesson outline and prompts for the instructor. I am convinced that the wise use of a two-screen system will prove to be the best. Of course, if you desire to only use the computer overlay/video screen you can turn off the computer screen with the software, but at least you will have the option of using the second screen if you wish. I think that the growing use of multi-tasking, desk-top computer software accessories is going to increase the use of two-screen interactive videodisc systems.

Try to match the components of you r system intelligently and try not to be overly swayed by your budget limitations. One project had a $2500 videodisc player controlled by a $400 computer. The final product was ludicrous, black and white block graphics and square lettering appeared in conjunction with fine quality colour video. Likewise, it would seem silly to use a $10,000 computer to control a $600 video disc player. There is a concept called impedance matching in physics and it seems to have an analogous concept in the interactive video business that roughly works out to be cost matching. Try to get the costs and capabilities of all the aspects of your systems to be about the same. And remember that professional thinking time and costs will far outweigh your production costs and the costs of your delivery hardware. Do not cheat your lessons by trying to deliver cutting edge interactive lessons on the hardware of the previous electronic generation. On the other hand, I tend not to favour being the first person in the world to use a particular interactive video hardware system for the authoring and/or delivery of my lessons. I like to take a system that someone else has already got to work satisfactorily and then push it to its limits to see what is the best lesson I can create using a system that I know will work.

So far, I have not been impressed by authoring languages for interactive lessons. I realise that every company that sells interactive lessons to users prides itself on its own special authoring system. I have never used them. All of the projects that I have done have used a standard computer language such as Pascal and clever programmers to make the interactive lessons do what I wanted them to do. The idea of having an authoring language so that I could sit down at a computer terminal and write my own lesson directly into computer code does not appeal to me. In fact, I think that such a system would always tend to impose some software constraints on the way I would develop my lessons and incline me to make m y lessons easier to program and, perhaps, not as interesting or effective as if someone else has to make the computer do what I want the lesson to do.

1.8 SHOULD YOU REALLY DO IT?

Perhaps by now you are put off about interactive video because of all the advice offered in this chapter. While an interactive video project does have several components that have to be brought together to make it all come out right, it is really not so bad. To help you organise your thinking about your interactive video project I have included Fig 1.1 that presents the suggestions of this chapter in outline form.

Producing an interactive videodisc lesson from start to finish is one of the most interesting and enjoyable tasks a professional educator can undertake. It is a combination of writing a movie script, a textbook, and a computer game, all rolled into one. Each of the videodisc projects in which I have been involved has taken on a distinct personality of its own as the project evolved. Finally, it se ems, with the disc about two-thirds of the way finished, the disc personality takes over the creative process and drives the project team to the conclusion of the lesson. I have the most vivid memories of this occurring for both the Tacoma Narrows and the Bicycle videodiscs. With a few thousand frames left to script for each disc, the project team ground to a halt and had to reassess the total content of the disc and decide how to bring it all to a conclusion. From the previous work on the disc and a rethinking of the physics involved, each project personality seemed to indicate the direction to go to conclude the disc. Thus the threefold ending on the Tacoma Narrows concludes with the Ella Fitzgerald Memorex ad. The Bicycle disc (Fuller and Zollman, 1984) ends with the puzzle of the output energy of the bicycle being much greater than the energy input as calculated from the disc by the students, how can that be? Neither ending was what we had in mind when we started the two discs.

Not only do int eractive video lessons promise enhanced learning opportunities for students, they also offer academics a new avenue for creative expression. So take up your pen, your video camera, and your computer keyboard and start creating! I think you'll like it!

INTERACTIVE VIDEODISC (IV) CHECK-LIST
Problems to solveHints towards solutions

Deciding to do IVConsider interactivity and active learning
Choosing IV contentExamine discipline-based structure and criteria (try brainstorming for visual images)
Raising money—how much?Do your budget analysis (total costs can vary from US $3000 to $600,000 for 100 discs)
Organising your project te amGet the help you need
Content specialists
Instructional design/evaluation
Interactive computer software
Video images
Obtaining hardware and softwareMatch videodisc player and computer hardware costs.
(Try for the best, latest computer you can afford.)
Use a standard high level computer language
Provide computer overlay onto videodisc images
Getting startedPut your hands on IV equipment
Do background reading
Talk to an experienced IV author/producer
Doing itTry it
You'll Like It

Fig. 1.1—Setting up an interactive videodisc project.

REFERENCES

Daynes, R. and Butler, B. (eds) (1984) The Videodisc Book, A Guide and Directory, John Wiley, New York.

Flo yd, S. and Floyd, B. (eds) (1982) Handbook of Interactive Video, Knowledge Industry Publications.

Fuller, R. G. and Zollman, D. (1984) Energy Transformations Featuring the Bicycle, Great Plains Media Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE.

Fuller, R. G., Zollman, D. and Campbell, T. C. (1982) The Puzzle of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse, John Wiley, New York.

Miller, F. (1970) Amer. J. Phys., 39(l), 5-8.

Parsloe, E. (ed.) (1983) Interactive Video, Sigma Technical Press.

Williams, K., Wright, M. et al. (1984) Introduction to Materials Science, The Open University/BBC, Milton Keynes, UK.

Zollman, D. and Fuller, R. G. (1983) Studies in Motion, Great Plains Media Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE.


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