The use of multimedia and multimodal resources is commonly associated with teaching aids and presentation support materials to accompany, complement and enrich the delivery of some topical content. The presenter or educator is attempting to inform, introduce or demonstrate a concept or a process to learners by suitably pitching the content, as well as adapting the delivery to a target audience. The adoption of different resources could also be intended to have a rhetorical, graphic or inspiring effect. It could be the case that educators are attempting to achieve all these goals through their elearning courses, optimising the impact of their delivery, as well as ensuring that the learners are extracting maximum benefit. Consider flipping the scenario and applying the same conceptual reasoning to learners producing and delivering their evidentiary work in the form of knowledge artefacts created through rich digital media and multimodal resources. The reason they would do so is not only to perform well, but also to contribute to the library of educational resources they share with their peers in their academic programme.

Mastery learning involves giving students the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of content at different time intervals before moving on to the next topic [5, 6, 7, 8]. According to Bloom [2], the “basic task in education is to find strategies which will take individual differences into consideration, but which will do so in such a way as to promote the fullest development of the individual” (p. 3). He also stated that when given sufficient time and corrective feedback in a timely manner, students achieve a specified level of content knowledge for each topic prior to the next progression. Studies indicate that in comparison to traditional approach (e.g. teacher-centred method), the mastery learning approach yields better student retention, more effective transfer of knowledge, greater interest and positive attitudes from students because they are given wider opportunities to demonstrate mastery of content [9, 10]. In the online learning environment, formative assessment enables students to test their understanding at intervals and instant feedback can improve their mastery of a topic [11]. Online platforms also give instructors opportunity to focus more on content delivery and save time from repetitive marking and record keeping [12]. A wide range of studies have found online settings to be beneficial to mastery learning [13, 14, 15, 16].

Althought not essential or dependent upon participants completing the course, I suspect some elements of the course has been influenced by the course tutors’ book (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). The course introduces the notion of the “7 affordances of e-learning ecologies”, which consist of:

Ubiquitous Learning
Active Knowledge Making
Multimodal Meaning
Recursive Feedback
Collaborative Intelligence
Metacognition
Differentiated Learning

http://aotzirides.web.illinois.edu/Multimodal_Mastery_Learning.pdf

https://www.waynebarry.com/2015/01/24/the-e-learning-ecologies-mooc/