The 12 principles of multimedia learning

Warm-up: What principles should we apply when creating multimedia content?

Richard Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has spent decades studying how people learn from words and pictures. His research shows that our working memory has two channels, one for what we see and one for what we hear, and that each channel can only process a small amount of information at a time. From these findings, he drew 12 practical principles for designing effective multimedia lessons.

In short, they help you reduce unnecessary load on learners' minds: cut out extra material (coherence), highlight what matters (signaling), avoid repeating on-screen text that is already narrated (redundancy), place words next to the pictures they describe (spatial contiguity) and present them at the same time (temporal contiguity). They also help you manage complex content: break it into learner-paced chunks (segmenting), introduce key terms first (pre-training) and combine pictures with spoken words (modality, multimedia). Finally, they encourage a friendly, human tone: a conversational style (personalization), a natural human voice (voice) and no need to show the speaker on screen (image).

First, listen to a short introduction of Richard Mayer and fill in the gaps. Then watch the video and fill in the gaps. Finally, match each principle with its definition.

• Reference video: Mayer's Principles of Multimedia Design
• Who is Richard Mayer? Listen and fill in the gaps
• Watch the video and fill in the gaps
• Match the principles with their definitions
• The video comes from the YouTube channel of the University Center for Teaching and Learning (University of Pittsburgh).