What if, instead of presentation vehicles, mutlimodal projects could function as platforms for analyzing and synthesizing complex ideas and as a means of generating new hypotheses or research questions?
A Common Starting Point
Faculty often reach out with a practical question:
“Can you show my students how to make a podcast?”
Or a video essay, or an audio documentary.
In many courses, students have already completed substantial research before beginning production. The shift into media then centers on learning tools and preparing a final project.
This sequencing makes sense. It positions media as a way to communicate ideas that have taken shape through earlier work.
In some courses, however, instructors experiment with introducing the medium while research questions and structures are still evolving. In those settings, production begins to influence how students frame evidence, synthesize readings, and shape arguments. The act of making becomes part of how understanding develops.
From Presentation System to Generative System
| Multimedia as Presentation | Multimedia as Inquiry |
|---|---|
| Medium arrives after ideas are fixed | Medium arrives while ideas are forming |
| Making translates finished thinking | Making generates new understanding |
| Students ask: "How do I make this sound good?" | Students ask: "What happens when I try this?" |
| Research → Script → Production | Research ↔ Story ↔ Making (continuous) |
| Focus: polished output | Focus: process of discovery |
This approach and framing emphasizes the process of discovery as much as the communicative outcome. Making becomes a site where understanding develops, rather than a stage where it is displayed.
Considerations That Create Conditions
Across many courses, we have noticed recurring conditions that help media projects become sites of active inquiry. These conditions often live in brief exercises, early experiments, or small framing decisions that are easy to integrate into an existing syllabus.
What follows highlights some of these high-impact touchpoints. Faculty incorporate them in ways that align with their own goals and course rhythms.
- Research Foundation
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Research remains the anchor—but it stays open during making. When students encounter the medium while research is active, they can ask: What kind of evidence does this form need? What questions does the medium help me ask? Discovery continues through production.
- Early Encounters with Making
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Students need to touch the tools while ideas are still forming, not just at the end. These are brief, low-stakes moments where they experience what the medium does: what it reveals, resists, makes possible. Early friction is productive. Late friction feels like a wall. These micro-engagements can function as laboratories of entanglement and disclosure: students come to see that research communication emerges from an ecosystem of tools, habits, and relations.
- Analyzing Exemplars
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Before students produce, they need to analyze. Close listening or viewing of published works teaches them to see media as composed and as the result of deliberate choices about structure, pacing, voice, evidence. They develop vocabulary for talking about craft, not just content.
- Scholarly Communication Practices
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The invisible infrastructures: organizing sources, tracking citations, managing files, understanding fair use. When students build these practices, iteration becomes possible. Without them, production becomes crisis management.
- Narrative and Rhetorical Shaping
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The translation checkpoint between research and production. This isn't about scripting which is just more "writing is evidence of thinking." It's about understanding arrangement, simultaneity, and sequence. Students learn to reconceive their inquiry as storyable units—discrete blocks with purpose in time. This is where "What am I trying to say?" meets "What will my audience experience?" Practices and methods become ways to re-see their research through the lens of the medium, finding a bridge between all that writing and the making process.
- Targeted Production Support
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Yes, students need to learn the tools and there are plenty of tutorials on the web for software features. But software tutorials disconnected from how tools can be used to generate meaning and construct evidence for their particular research questions is a different thing altogether. Tool instruction works best when it's focused on specific capabilities students need right now, framed rhetorically rather than as feature coverage. Instead of "here's how to cut audio" they learn "here's how to make a choice about where your argument turns."
- The Rough Artifact
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The hinge point of the entire design. Build in a checkpoint to see a rough draft midway through the semester. Students attempt a partial version in actual form while ideas are still flexible. Not polished, not complete—a serious sketch that lets the medium talk back. Questions surface that no outline could predict. There's still time to rethink.
- Reflection & Process
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Reflection isn't just about describing what happened. It's about noticing what's happening while it's happening. Brief, ongoing documentation helps students see making as inquiry, capture productive uncertainty, and build evidence for assessing process and growth.
- Assessment That Notices Complexity
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What are you asking students to get good at—and does your assessment make that visible? We're big fans of the the MAP domains (Artifact, Context, Substance, Process & Technique, Habits of Mind) which offer lenses for noticing complexity beyond polish. You can only fairly assess what you've designed conditions to see. See more.
A brief planning conversation with us strengthens the alignment between your goals and the student experience.
Get Started
Connect with us at troy@wm.edu to talk through a project or request instructional support. We look forward to collaborating with you and your students.