The Principles of Multimedia Learning
Learning Mayer’s principles of learning has been a very eye-opening experience. Each principle contributes to the learner being able obtain and retain information in it’s own unique way. Furthermore, how each of the principles fit into the broader Cognitive Load categories sheds light on how to properly construct new lessons and teaching experiences for learners. As I read about the different principles, I reflect on the different lessons infused with those principles that I have learned in the past.
Reflection Question: Provide an example of a multimedia learning principle that you have intuitively followed in the past, and an example of a multimedia learning principle that you have not followed in the past. What will you do differently now?
One of Mayer’s principles of Multimedia Learning that I intuitively follow is the spatial contiguity principle – keeping words and pictures close to each other. In many of the PowerPoints that I have created and in my mini course that I created for another Curriculum and Instruction course, I sought to include a couple of strategically positioned visuals and symbols to supplement the information provided through text on slides when appropriate. I find that visuals next to words allows learners to draw on the relationships between them and the surrounding content more seamlessly and reduces the chance of them misinterpreting the content. It creates a natural flow between the ideas and requires the learner to use less energy to make any meaning from it.
Conversely, one of the learning principles that I have disregarded in the past is pretraining. While presenting diagrams and images can help ideas together, learners can still be inundated with the amount of information that they must absorb at once. Pretraining remedies this by priming students to learn more complex ideas once they have first learned the key concepts and definitions first. For my part, I will begin applying the pretraining principle by presenting all the necessary tools and definitions before exploring how we will use them. If necessary, I will include them in an entire introductory section to explain this information if I see that it may be beneficial to learners.
Screen casting showcase: Grammarly
In my screencast I decided to showcase Grammarly: an online writing tool to help you write letters and documents that convey the proper meaning that you want them to. This is accomplished by giving you spelling and grammar aid, word and tone substitutions, and a customizable to audience slider to tweak your suggestions to the audience of your document.
As for preparation, I have done a screencast using Zoom before so capturing the audio and video and exporting to another device was not too hard for me. Moreover, the body of the presentation was largely unscripted with the exception of the introduction. I felt that this approach allowed me to be conversational in the way I talked; I was able to naturally guide the learner through the process of the interface and using the service instead of speaking off of a premade script in a machinelike way. In this way, I am also demonstrating the personalization principle. In my future screencasts, I will focus on the segmenting principle and look for ways to break down the content into smaller chunks that build on each other even if it will result in a longer video.
Featured image: Wiley University Services. “Principles of Multimedia Learning”. https://ctl.wiley.com/principles-of-multimedia-learning/
