Monday, March 15, 2021

Mayer's multimedia use for learning

Professor Richard Mayer is well-known in elearning circles for his research on the design of multimedia to be used to support learning and teaching. He has been a productive researcher, publishing many books and hundreds of research articles. 

Much of his work is summarised in the book "multimedia learning" the third edition published in 2020. Therefore there is lots of reading to get to the nub of his work.

Here is a link, via LinkedIn posts to 'How to use Mayer's 12 principles of multimedia' which provides a succinct and clear overview of the main premises of his work. 

In short, when designing and developing multimedia to support learning and teaching, the principles are:

-coherence - ensure only the important part is included.

- signalling - use cues to highlight essential learning

- redundancy - use graphics and narration rather than graphics, narration and text

- spatial continguity - connect similar themes 

- temporal continguity - ensure similar themes are presented together

- segmenting - use chunks which make sense to the learner

- pre-training - introduce key vocabulary before concepts

- modality - use graphics and narration rather than graphics and text

- multimedia - words and pictures together work better

- personalisation - use conversational style of communication

- voice - use human voices instead of machine generated

- image - not necessary to have speaker's image added to the screen.

All the 12 principles require critical evaluation as they are applied to multimedia resources. As always, it is the detail and execution of the resource which requires time. The final arbiter of the effectiveness of the resource, will be the learners. Did they learn the principle/concept by working through the resource? 

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