Tony Bates argues that there is a broad continuum in educational broadcasts, from programmes with no embedded style of use ('enrichment programmes') through programmes explicitly designed for active teacher intervention (referred to here as 'teaching resources'), to programmes which directly teach. Each type requires a different structure. Programmes designed as teaching resources do not need to be continuous and free-standing. They might include questions or activities for learners at different points in the programme and might explictly require pausing (and therefore need to be recorded). Bates believes that programme styles and structures influence not only the nature of the communication but the meanings people derive from the programmes.
Learners will have difficulties with programmes
For example, Salomon (1981) argued that learners tend to see television as an 'easy' medium compared with print, and may not make the mental effort necessary for learning to take place.
Bates notes that there is now clear evidence that certain styles of programme appear to be more suitable for specific types of audience, and for certain types of learning objective. A programme style that will work well for one target group and for particular learning objectives will be unsuitable for others. Bates argues that decisions regarding programming style and structure influence not so much what people will learn from these programmes, but rather how they will think about or use the material. For example, whether they will go for comprehension or analysis. Furthermore, these effects are less significant in terms of individual programmes than in their cumulative, long-term effects. Thus decisions about the structure and style of programmes are just as much educational as technical decisions.
Bates and Gallagher (1977) report on the widespread use of 'television case-studies' at the Open University. Whilst their research concerns adult students on academic correspondence courses, many of their observations are of much wider relevance to educational programmes.
The skills required of students watching OU television broadcasts were quite different from those found in their printed correspondence texts. The correspondence texts were theoretical, analytical and didactic. The television programmes dealt with concrete situations, and were open-ended, open to interpretation, and non-analytical. The television cases are sometimes of intrinsic value as major content areas with which students need to become familiar, but the main purpose of these programmes is for students to exercise higher order learning skills than comprehension, namely:
In several instances, the programmes provided the only opportunity in the course to practise such skills, outside of examination or assessment questions. (In some cases, 'readers' - collections of papers - or written case-studies provided a similar opportunity).
The reality was very different to the intentions. Bates and Gallagher explored this in relation to 5 main dimensions in such programmes: didactic/open-ended; passive/active; structured/ unstructured; integrated/ free-standing; and polemical/neutral.
Bates and Gallagher identify the didactic/open-ended dimension as perhaps the most important. It describes the extent to which the programme material is overtly analysed and/or explained for the student, or is simply presented for the student to interpret. A strongly didactic case-study programme might work through a solution to a problem for the students. A rather less didactic programme might provide students with considerable guidance through the programme commentary. A mid-range programme might provide pointers to key events, students being required to draw their own conclusions. A very open-ended programme might give virtually no guidance, confining help to printed notes. The researchers argue that students' skills in analysing case-study material may need to be - and can be - developed by training, and that where programmes are part of a course, there ought to be a steady and gradual progression from strong guidance (building on familiar concepts) to independent use.
Open-ended case-studies have several teaching functions:
A second important dimension in case-studies is the 'passive/active' dimension: the extent to which the student is expected to respond to case-study programmes. Activity can take a number of forms.
Overt activity might include:
Covert activity would include:
Bates and Gallagher note that there is overwhelmingly conclusive research evidence that learning takes place more effectively when students make an active response to a programme. Educational programmes which are similar in format to general broadcast documentaries may encourage students to take a passive attitude to the broadcasts. Programmes may be seen by students as a source of information when it may be intended to be a resource for the development of course skills. This is a particular danger with 'open-ended' case study programmes, which do not provide explicit cues in the programme itself to how the broadcast material relates to the general aims of a course. Open-ended programmes can thus lead to less active student responses than didactic programmes.
Most students find it difficult or impractical to take notes during the programmes. Many well-motivated OU students were unable to integrate an open-ended programme's empirical content with the related theory.
Case-studies are used in class teaching to stimulate discussion, with a teacher present to guide the discussion and to assist students in their interpretation of the material. Distance-learning, however, poses problems in stimulating an active response to case-study material.
The structure of case-study programmes can vary enormously, from a simple story, with a continuous, single, sequential thread, to a collage of unconnected shots, with no underlying rationale for the ordering of these shots apparent to the viewer. related to this is whether a case-study deals with single or multiple cases.
Another aspect of the structure of a programme - and also related very closely to the 'didactic/open-ended' dimension - is the role of commentary and the relationship of commentary to visuals. Very often the structural links are provided by the 'academic' commentary, either direct or to camera, or, more often, by voice over film. Commentary is not necessarily needed to provide structure, however: structure may be provided by the ordering of the shots, perhaps in a chronological or geographical sequence.
The structure and format of a case-study should as far as possible reinforce rather than detract from the educational aims of the programme. Where a programme's structure is complex, it ought to be because the pedagogic intention was for students to try and sort out the issues, and themselves impose some sort of structure on what they are seeing, rather than the result of bad planning or artistic and technical considerations.
Case-study programmes are likely to be more educationally effective if
It should normally be possible for case-study programmes to be filmed and edited so that they not only tell a story - 'this is what happens' - but also be structured in such a way that the analysis of WHY it is happening can be carried out by the student. Undue emphasis on the 'event' can make it very difficult for students to know how they should approach the television material other than to recall it in their own words at a later date.
At the Open University the integration of the different media can vary along the organisational dimension, from tightly integrated - with text, broadcasts and notes all directly related to one another, and to be worked through in a certain order for fullest understanding - to an almost free-standing component, with very tenuous links between broadcasts and texts in any one week's work.
If the aims are to have an integrated course, and the development of intellectual skills in analysing case-study programmes and applying academic concepts to such programes, then texts and broadcasts ought to be developed together rather than separately.
It is impossible to portray a truly objective view of the world in a 25 minute television case-study programme: it must be a selective and edited view of reality, and hence represent the ideology or viewpoints of the programme makers. This is true even for scientific or technological case-studies, since at most they represent only a set of 'best' solutions to particular problems in the light of current knowledge. Widespread acceptance of a certain viewpoint does not make it an objective truth.
Bates and Gallagher believe that it would often be both more honest and more educationally fruitful for a programme to take a clear stance regarding a subject, one which the student can recognise immediately, than to hide an ideology or viewpoint behind a contrived mask of neutrality.
Teachers are generally as concerned with establishing ways of thinking as with presenting 'facts' or 'theories'. Thus, a teacher is often as concerned with what establishes the validity of an argument, or viewpoint, as with the argument itself. The aim may not be to prove the existence of some phenomenon, but to point towards explanations and understanding. A case-study programme therefore often plays a dual role:
Bates and Gallagher argue that since television is at least as susceptible as print to bias it is the responsibility of educational institutions to develop in students a critical approach to television, when this is used as a major source of academic evidence and argument, as it is with case-study material.
Students need to be aware of the special techniques and characteristics of television and to be taught specifically to take account of their influence. Some of these features are as follows:
Presentational features. These spring from the formal conventions of film or television production. For example, the convention by which presenters or narrators talk directly to camera (which no other participant does) places them in a position of authority. Baggaley and Duck (1976) have shown empirically that viewers' perceptions of the reliability and credibility of television presenters are influenced by a whole range of presentation factors.
The editorial process. Reducing an 'event' or information about a topic to less than 25 minutes inevitably leads to a process of selection and condensation. The problem is that the student does not witness this process. The process of validating evidence is not open to the television viewer because the information is transient and the source is inaccessible. Even the editing of a 'talking head' can take someone's argument out of context and sequence, so that it can lead to a conclusion which may not have been that of the speaker. When programmes are using television material as 'evidence' of the real world, the student must be equipped to judge the context in which the evidence has been chosen and put together. This means revealing much more about how the programme is assembled. For instance, it is common practice to edit out an interviewer's questions, but to include the interviewee's responses, as if these were spontaneous statements. Yet questions structure the nature of the response, and can completely alter the amphasis an interviewee might give to a point.
Practical difficulties. There may be practical difficulties in getting television case-study material which illustrates a particular point. The camera crew may be too intrusive in a domestic setting. The circumstances may not be right at the time of filming. The theory may even be at variance with observable evidence.
Dual channels of information. The student has to deal simulataneously with two channels of communication: vision and sound. In many case-study programmes, the sound track provides the main source of 'academic' information. This is particularly true when interviews are heavily used. Visuals, although illustrating the content area, do not necessarily reinforce the 'argument' on the sound track. For instance, it is common practice to cut from a picture of a person being interviewd to a location film shot, with the interviewee's voice continuing over the shot, as if explaining the shot. However, the same film could often be used to 'illustrate' almost the opposite point, if there was a different commentary provided.
Affective influence. Television has the power to influence viewers subjectively, and hence to validate or refute arguments through reference to primarily emotional bases. Students emotional reaction to a programme can have a negative influence on their capacity to deal analytically with it. Educational programme makers need to be clear as to what is more important - a strong emotional reaction to a programme, or a cool intellectual analysis of the material - the two reactions are not necessarily compatible.
Academics and producers in most cases agreed on the relevance of the programmes to the course - they saw a congruence between the content of the programmes and the content of the correspondence texts, although the treatment of content and the choice of examples were different. However, for some of the programmes investigated, a majority of the students did not think that the programmes were very relevant or helpful ("I learnt nothing from this").
Roughly one third of the students watching such documentary programmes completely misunderstood their purpose. They were looking for new information or explanation of difficulties in the text, When they realised that the programmes did not do this, they dismissed them as irrelevant and a waste of time. Other students - again about a third of viewers - understood the purpose of the programmes but were unable to respond in the way intended. Last, roughly one third - sometimes as little as one sixth - of the students both understood and were able to use the programme material in the way intended. Not surprisingly, this last group tended to get high grades in the final examination.
Television is being used to encourage high-level mental skills (in the sense that they depend on the development of other learning skills before they can be used - see Bloom et al., 1956 and Gagne, 1970). Many students, even at university level, find it difficult to use television in this way. They tend to judge programme material by the extent to which it adds new knowledge or explains knowledge inadequately dealt with in the texts; not by the extent to which it enables them to use the knowledge gained in texts. A majority of students wanted more help in using such programmes.
Bates and Gallagher found that the programmes labelled as documentaries or case-studies had a complex structure and tended to be open-ended, passive in terms of overt responses. They also tended to be weakly linked organisationally to the correspondence text, but often closely linked in terms of shared content. They tended to adopt an overtly neutral style, but usually contained a very strong underlying stance to the topic.
The researchers suggest that the less experience students have in using television case-studies, the more programmes should begin at the didactic, structured, active, neutral and integrated ends of the various dimensions. They believe that students should be progressively weaned away from this kind of approach until they can handle a wide variety of programmes, including those which are open-ended, unstructured, polemical or free-standing.
Bates and Gallagher argue that the onus of developing skills in using television programmes should fall on the programmes themselves, rather than on supplementary material, but carefully designed broadcast notes, special programmes showing students how to analyse case-study material, and tutorial guidance are also needed.
*Adapted from Bates, 1981, 1984 and 1987
** Adapted from Bates and Gallagher (1977)