The Development and Usability of a Multimedia Black Cat Courseware using Storytelling Approach

Computer technology and multimedia in education have long been in the education field
since there are many advantages offered by the applications. The combination of multimedia
elements has influenced the way students learn, increase their performance and change the study
environments. Multimedia can also help in solving the matters pertaining to teaching and
learning process. This research aims to fulfil three main objectives: to design a simple model for
storytelling approach that can be used in the multimedia courseware; to develop a multimedia
courseware for English literature (BC-C) learning for pre-university level; to evaluate the
effectiveness and usability of the developed courseware.
The development of BC-C has taken into considerations few components such as the
pedagogy, learning theories and elements of multimedia in one digital environment. This will
allow the students to visualize the plots in the literature story, to understand some of the English
words and to make learning process more enjoyable. The developed courseware adapted ADDIE
methodology into the BC-C Life Cycle, as the Instructional Design Method. The courseware has
been developed using Macromedia Director, Flash and other multimedia software. There are four
modules: story, exploratory, reinforcement and enrichment. Storytelling approach in BC-C has
presented via 2D cartoon movie to help students visualize the flow of the plots for the Black Cat
literature story.
Based on Quasi experiment, the sample study consisted of 60 Universiti Teknologi
PETRONAS (UTP) second semester, Foundation program students. Various instruments such as
sets of pre-test and post-test, direct observation, questionnaires and interview have been designed
to measure the effectiveness and usability of the multimedia courseware. The effectiveness and
usability of the courseware were evaluated based on the quantitative and qualitative analyses
using SPSS version 11.5. Overall, the results show that BC-C prototype is effective for learning
English literature at the pre-university level, for the case study of UTP Foundation students.