Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

This lesson discusses the various pedagogical differences between media. Identifying appropriate uses of media is both an increasingly important requirement of teachers and instructors in a digital age and a very complex challenge. This is one reason for working closely with instructional designers and media professionals whenever possible. Teachers working with instructional designers will need to decide which media they intend to use on pedagogical as well as operational grounds.

However, once the choice of media has been made, by focusing on design issues we can provide further guidelines for making appropriate use of media. In particular, having gone through the process of identifying possible teaching roles or functions for different media, we can then draw on the work of Mayer (2012) and Koumi (2006, 2015) to ensure that whatever choice or a mix of media we have decided on, the design leads to effective teaching.

Mayer’s research focused heavily on cognitive overload in rich, multimedia teaching. From all his research over many years, Mayer identified 12 principles of multimedia design, based on how learners cognitively process multimedia:

People learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included. Basically, keep it simple in media terms.

People learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added. This replicates earlier findings by Bates and Gallagher (1977). Students need to know what to look for in multimedia materials.

People learn better from graphics + narration, than from graphics, narration and on-screen text.

People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

People learn better when a multimedia lesson is presented in user-paced segments rather than as a continuous lesson. Thus several ‘YouTube’ length videos are more likely to work better than a 50-minute video.

People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and the characteristics of the main concepts. This suggests a design feature for flipped classrooms, for instance. It may be better to use a lecture or readings that provide a summary of key concepts and principles before showing more detailed examples or applications of such principles in a video.

People learn better from graphics and narration than from animation and on-screen text. This reflects the importance of learners being able to combine both hearing and viewing at the same time to reinforce each other in specific ways.

People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. This also reinforces what I wrote in 1995: Make all four media available to teachers and learners (Bates, 1995, p.13).

People learn better from multimedia lessons when words are in conversational style rather than formal style. I would go even further than Mayer here. Multimedia can enable learners (particularly distance learners) to relate to the instructor, as suggested by Durbridge’s research (1983, 1984) on audio combined with text. Providing a ‘human voice and face’ to the teaching helps motivate learners, and makes multimedia teaching feel that it is directed solely at the individual learner, if a conversational style is adopted.

People learn better when the narration in multimedia lessons is spoken in a friendly human voice rather than a machine voice. 

People do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.

In re-reading Mayer’s work, I am struck by the similarities in findings, using different research methods, different multimedia technologies, and different contexts, to the research from the Audio-Visual Media Research Group at the British Open University in the 1970s and 1980s (Bates, 1984).

More recently, the University of British Columbia has done an excellent job of suggesting how Mayer’s design principles could be operationalized. Staff at the University of British Columbia have combined Mayer’s findings with Robert Talbert’s experience from developing a series of successful screencasts on mathematics, into a set of practical design guidelines for multimedia production.

Talbert’s key design principles are:

• Keep it Simple: focus on one idea at a time.
• Keep it Short: keep videos to a length of 5-6 minutes max. To maximize attention.
• Keep it Real: model the decision making and problem-solving processes of expert learners.
• Keep it Good: be intentional about planning the video; strive to produce the best video and audio quality possible.

Thus design decisions are critical in influencing the effectiveness of a particular technology. Well-designed lectures will teach better than a poorly designed online course, and vice versa.