Multimedia and Instruction

Multimedia communication has long been recognized as offering new and exciting ways to deliver instruction. Multimedia in business training has become commonplace. According to Fryer, "companies that are either investing in or looking at multimedia training are also interested in the rapid return on investment that they can achieve" (57). The alternative, onsite and offsite training programs, is expensive. For instance, companies can pay $2000.00 per day for instructors to conduct onsite training for their employees. The same information can be delivered onsite at a flexible, convenient time in multimedia format by the company. Additionally, company-wide offsite training is costly because companies have to pay airline, hotel, and food expenses on top of the cost of the training seminar.

Uses for multimedia in training environments:

• Flight attendants learn to manage emergency situations and security procedures through multimedia simulation.
• Sales representatives learn about the products their company sells and even use multimedia programs to teach customers how to use the product they just purchased.
• Business conferences become interesting when the presenter incorporates a multimedia presentation.

As technology continues to develop, it will offer more and more ways to train people at their workstations. In his article Multimedia Training: The Key to Your Next Job Fryer cites a survey of the Fortune 1000 conducted by a research firm that found that "45% of the larger companies are already using multimedia technologies to do a portion of their in-house training" (56).