Publication Date: April 11, 1997

Related article: Multimedia Has a Home in Corporate America

Multimedia: Putting You in the Driver's Seat

By Ken Shulman

It's called Multimedia 101, but it is no ordinary course. For one thing, it takes place on your computer screen.

Students who enter the Firefly Films CD-ROM multimedia trainer can select from one of three instructors: Coach Vince Bombardi, who intimidates his students into doing their homework; The Nutty Professor, who forgets his lines halfway through the lesson; or sharp-tongued Sister Sandra, who threatens her charges with after-school assignments and detention. Students learn new words. They are cajoled and scolded. They play Hangman, and discover that the major benefit of multimedia is I-N-T-E-R-A-C-T-I-V-I-T-Y. The course is full of choices. Each choice leads to new choices. Each answer leads to another question.

"Unless people are very comfortable with the new technology, they tend to get nervous the first time they are exposed to multimedia," says Hillary Wiesman, president of the Newton, Mass.-based Firefly Films that produced the Multimedia 101 CD-ROM. The Firefly Films project is designed to show commercial clients some of the potential benefits of multimedia and interactive technology. "This is a humorous and engaging way to provoke their interest without scaring them off. By putting them in a classroom environment, they grow comfortable participating in the lesson. And they see that this interactivity can greatly increase retention levels, both in employees and in clients."

Already popular with computer game designers and Hollywood special-effects types, multimedia is rapidly proving to be an effective educational, training and publicity tool as well. At Tarragon Interactive, another Newton, Mass., company, senior partner John Francis develops multimedia applications for a broad range of business and government clients. Francis has produced a training CD-ROM to educate factory workers on safety procedures, and an intranet-based multimedia project to help Massachusetts state employees better understand the functions of their jobs. He has also produced several successful sales applications.

"Our sales process was basically paper," says Chuck Conley, director of marketing at Segue Software. Located in Newton Center, the publicly traded company is the industry leader in automated testing for software reliability. Tarragon Interactive created an interactive CD-ROM to help the Segue sales force present its QualityWorks product to potential customers.

"One of the virtues of our products is that they can span an entire client/server topology, from Unix server to Macintosh to Windows or NT. Another is our six-step process," says Conley. "It's one thing to explain these concepts with hand-held charts and slides. With the CD-ROM, we can effectively demonstrate to our prospects and customers how our products are different than those of our competitors."

While sales and sales training seminars have already been enhanced by the new technology, it is doubtful that multimedia will ever replace cold calls or shoe leather. Those companies that have incorporated some multimedia elements in their sales presentations are finding that these are most effective after the client has exhibited some initial interest. "It lets a salesperson further qualify his product with a customer; to show the customer how the product might work best for him," says Tarragon's Francis. "Used properly, it also can winnow down the aggregate cost of sales. It's a lot cheaper to ship out a CD-ROM to a prospective lead in Pittsburgh than to fly down a salesperson. Companies can save their travel dollars until a physical presence is needed."

One of the areas most likely to be revolutionized by multimedia is education. At Interactive Factory in Boston, Mass., creative director and president David Rose designs products that help students of all ages acquire and hone their learning skills. Boston-based educational publisher Houghton Mifflin used Interactive Factory to produce language learning CD-ROMs in French, Spanish and German.

"Our objective was to produce a set of extremely interactive CD-ROMs," says Kristina Baer, director of the modern language program at Houghton Mifflin's college division. "You can't learn a language by just reading about it or listening to it, especially if you are over 16 or 17 years of age. You need to use that language as quickly as possible, and as much as possible, no matter what your level is."

The Houghton Mifflin multimedia CD-ROM program uses short segments of proprietary videos to foster listening and comprehension skills in students. For Baer, the greatest advantage that multimedia offers language students is the interactive element, and the greater sense of control. "A standard video can be an effective language learning tool," she admits, "but much of learning a language is based on repetition, and it is very inconvenient to have to back up on your VCR each time you don't understand something. Our idea was to allow students to listen to fragments of our video clips as many times as they wanted to, to give them game-like activities that would engage them and then enable them to tackle larger segments of video and text. We wanted to put students into the driver's seat."

Ken Shulman writes from Cambridge, Mass.

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