Activity 3.2 – Principles of Multimedia

A multimedia instructional message is a communication using words and pictures that is intended to promote learning.

For example, a multimedia instructional message in a book could include printed text and illustrations, whereas a multimedia instructional message on a computer could include narration and animation.

Examples of multimedia instructional messages include words and pictures intended to explain how lightning storms develop, how car braking systems works, and how a bicycle tyre pumps work.

Richard Mayer, p.21
Multimedia Learning

READ: Mayer, Richard E. & Moreno, Roxana 2003, Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning in Educational Psychologist, 38 (1), pp43-52.

7 Principles of Multimedia Design

1. Multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.

2. Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

3. Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

4. Coherence Principle: Students learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.

5. Modality Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.

6. Redundancy Principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and on-screen text.

7. Individual Differences Principle: Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners rather than low-spatial learners.

Consider your course and make notes where multimedia may be of value.

Because I am not a Program Design student, I’ve been allocated the ‘Facilitating e-Learning’ course to use as the basis of my second assignment and as such, multimedia will be immensely valuable to the course as using multimedia will be integral to facilitating any form of e-Learning. And so using multimedia in the delivery of the course as well as including activities where the learner would be required to create different types of multimedia will educate the learner about multimedia. Furthermore, it has been addressed that because of time restraints, we will not be required to look at multimedia in regards to our assignment. We will only be asked in these exercises to think about it and so responses will not be too comprehensive.