A needs assessment enquiry into the creation of media resources by secondary school students

Abstract

The Educational Technology Division (ETD) creates media such as educational videos (eVideos) and audio programmes to support the national curriculum. ETD has been exploring possibilities of collaborating with schools to create media to build schools’ capacity at creating resources that meets their own specific needs. The first such collaborative project that ETD embarked on, where the designers of the media were students, was a DVD project referred to as Trees. The Trees DVD project used a thematic approach in developing the content in the DVD project. It used the interactivity provided by DVD technology to provide multi-disciplinary dimensions to the theme of “trees”. Three schools came on board this project and contributed the content on the different dimensions on the theme. They also authored the DVD with the professional input and resources rendered by the expertise of Ngee Ann Polytechnic and NParks. A key expectation in managing and completing the project is the pupils’ ability at the various skills in video production such as conceptualisation, scriptwriting, storyboarding, video and audio recording, editing, etc as well as knowledge about copyrights clearance. The ability to manage and complete the project is also largely addressed by examining the role of the teacher and the teachers’ ability to manage a video team. This study will examine the needs, capabilities and constraints of both ETD and schools for media creation between ETD and schools. The findings of the investigation will be used to propose a training solution for schools to fill the anticipated performance gap in videomaking in schools and any other non-training issues that will need to be addressed to carry out media creation projects in schools.