Adopting an innovative multiple media approach to learning for equity groups : electronicaly-mediated learning for off-campus students

Students that come from disadvantaged backgrounds have more that their fair share of obstacles to overcome when seeking a university education. This paper describes an innovative approach, adopted by the course designers, that uses a mix of educational media and technology to deliver a high impact and quality learning experience to disadvantaged students seeking to enter university via non-traditional means. Media and learning style research has shown that learners come to education with a wide range of learning preferences based on their cognitive styles, as well as significant levels of prior knowledge and experience. This paper details how the course designers have designed and developed a number of media products with a view to supporting as many individual learning differences as possible by providing overlaps in the respective media and technologies. The paper describes the course design and details reasons for those design decisions. The paper also presents and interprets the course evaluation data collected from the first two offerings and makes some recommendations for course designers working in this area, based on an analysis of this data.