The following tips are adapted from eLearning and the Science of Instruction:

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011). E-learning and the science of instruction : proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning (3rd ed. ed.). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

While we’re not strictly creating complete eLearning experiences for our students, we are asking students to interact with our content online. To that end, I wanted to take Mayer’s principles for multimedia learning and see how they might apply to all of us who are trying to communicate with our students in this virtual learning enviornment.

Disclaimer: I’m broadly interpreting these principles and in some cases, potentially twisting their original meaning completely. Know that I’m doing so because I want the ideas to appeal to the masses.

Multimedia

“Use words and graphics rather than words alone.”

While a lot of us might not be using graphics and text in our own content, it’s worth asking ourselves: can we make things more clear by including an image (chart, graph, map, drawing, etc…) with our static text?

Contiguity

“Align words to corresponding graphics.”

Don’t make your learner switch back and forth from a graphic to a text element, from an email to a .pdf, from a Schoology assignment, to an instruction page. Keep things together, plain and simple.

Modality

“Present words as audio narration rather than on-screen text.”

Audio narration. I think students would love to hear from us and they’d love to hear our instructions delivered concisely and first hand. Is there something that you’re delivered as a text document that you could have delivered as an audio/video message instead?

Redundancy

“Explain visuals with words in audio or text: not both.”

In this case, we really need to remember that our students are trying to process a lot of information and we should be careful not to overload the human brain’s capacity to process incoming information. Take it slow and present your information with this in mind.

Coherence

“Adding material can hurt learning.”

If I’m being honest. This is the one I struggle with the most. Remove any and all unnecessary (albeit interesting) information when you’re creating your online content. This means all the sidebars that you might usually include in your classroom teaching are not helpful. Save the unnecessary information for casual conversation during your virtual “office hours.”

Personalization

“Use conversational style and virtual coaches.”

There are no virtual coaches (except us!) in this virtual learning experience, so it means we need to be engaging in the conversation with the learners. Don’t just share a PowerPoint or Google Slide document and ask them to work their way through it. Instead, talk them through it and use a conversational tone. Dial back the professionalism just a notch and your learners will appreciate it.

Segmenting

“Manage the complexity by breaking a lesson into parts.”

Our students are managing a lot right now and we would do well to present our information with the segmenting principle in mind. Yes, absolutely break things into smaller, more manageable chunks. Also, do everything you can to put lesson pacing and control in the hands of the learners.

Pretraining

“Ensure that learners know names and characteristics of key concepts.”

I can hear the roar of 1000 teachers as I type this: “We’ve already covered this information, so the students should know it by now!”

While that might be true, wouldn’t it facilitate greater learning if you were able to provide an opportunity for your learners to refresh themselves on key terms and information as they work their way into new material? It’s not always easy, but if the end goal is better learning, it’s the right thing to do.

We’ve got this.

I hope it has been helpful to consider these rules of multimedia learning and how they might apply to virtual learning in general.

For further reading, here’s an article that includes a handy one-page graphic that I have printed and keep nearby.

Embrace this experience and build your lessons with the student in mind and you will see great results.