e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates

Emotions in multimodal and the challenge of making

What I am about to write is nothing new, but it is something I have been challenged more and more due to Coronavirus. That emotions is to knowledge what cement is to bricks is no news to any one, but creating contents that convey the right emotions to the right learners is not as easy when the demand is so heavy.

Since the contents of my work belong to the company and I cannot comment them here, I will use a current example in this course: volcanoes. I can be a master of words and describe the volcanoes in a way the reader can have a clear of what it is. Of course, if I add a picture, it is worth a thousand words. But if I really want people to understant what is the place of a volcano in a human society, I need emotion. Like telling the story of a person that has to climb it, for example, and the deathly gases, sharp rocks and all that.

Obviously I can add videos, true stories, pictures and numbers to show how volcanoes are dangerous, and also how good they are for the creation of future rich soil, but the creation of such contents is very time-consuming, even without travel restrictions. The thing I lack the most (and my colleagues all agree with me) is a way to easily build audiovisual scenarios for the stories we want to create to convey the message, without needing complex 3D modelling, expensive software, and the precious, scarce time.

I am a fairly good story teller, but that is not a common feature in the engineering world, and the limits of !user empowerment" today force them to either do what they can with what they have (PowerPoint and Image search), or come to me for the creation. This impacts the organization as a whole, and I wish to be alive to see the new DIY 3D softwares that will enable us to build and change worlds in a second with the collaboration of the learners.