Multimedia Program Development

Multimedia is a powerful tool for teaching, learning, collaboration, and communication of ideas, but it is A.) Is expensive to produce, B.) can be difficult to find/source/license, and C.) Requires expertise, equipment, and specialized skills to create and use effectively. Additionally, media production specialists aren’t often teaching and learning experts, and vice versa- and we know through research (and likely personal experience) that production quality isn’t correlated with learning effectiveness. Teaching through multimedia requires building up the skills to teach effectively over multimedia, and to implement the media intelligently through the learning experience you’re creating. This requires practice, experimentation, and failing a whole bunch of times. At the same time, it is cost-prohibitive for most institutions of learning to produce their own media, let alone experiment with it. The solution? Your own small, low-cost, modular media incubators.

Creating Pedagogically Effective, Low Cost Media Production Capacity

Having your own media studio doesn’t just mean the ability to cheaply create the exact educational media you want, it also means lowering the barriers to developing media literacy, provides learners alternate modalities of interaction with content, and provides development opportunities to teachers to improve their craft.

Through a systematic review of your needs, environment, and constraints, we can limit the equipment to our specific needs, and create a workflow for any scenario. We’ve worked with clients to create media incubators and workflows that facilitate teaching-skill development, educational media production, classroom-activity facilitation, and research and policy communication. We’ve also crafted our workflows to be facilitated by a normal teacher (untrained in media production), for a single technician, and even for large teams of producers with disparate backgrounds (e.g., media producers, instructional designers, teachers, content experts).

If you’re interested in discussing what this might look like in your specific application, give Jake an email at jwaxman@jakewaxman.com

Harvard School of Public Health’s only Center-facing multimodal pedagogy experimentation lab

In January of 2016, Jake took on his first project designing a small-scale multimedia hub for multimodal pedagogical experimentation and the professional development of faculty teaching. Over the course of his tenure, the Media Hub would go on to create multiple semester-long courses, run countless faculty professional development residencies, and created hundreds of media products.

Lowering Equipment Costs

The needs of teaching over media are different than those of filming a television show. Through greater consumer access to media production technology, and selectively  choosing equipment that directly fits the clients needs, we can lower the initial investment substantially, with packages starting around $10,000.

Lowering Operating Costs

By designing the space and workflow intelligently and around your specific needs, we can create workflows that can be operated by a single technician, or even an employee in their spare time.

Creating Sustainability

Every program we develop comes with an initial training with Jake, along with follow-up trainings and support to help you sustain your capacity and fully realize your teaching potential.

Approachable and Supported

Through back-end design and a workflow customization, we can make producing high-quality educational media do-able for anybody. We can create workflows operable by an overworked teacher, or for a working-group of fifth-graders.

And for anything that comes up that you can’t tackle, we’re here to support you. Through workshops and on-demand support, we’ll help you use your media incubator to its fullest potential.