Evidence-based principles for how to design effective instructional vidoes

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211368121000231

Drawing on research conducted by Mayer (2020), this article examines evidence-based principles for how to design effective instructional videos and shows how they are grounded in cognitive theories of learning and instruction.

Principles include

• multimedia (present words and graphics),
• coherence (avoid extraneous material in slides and script),
• signaling (highlight key material),
• redundancy (do not add captions that repeat the spoken words),
• spatial contiguity (place printed text next to corresponding part of graphic),
• temporal contiguity (present corresponding visual and verbal material at the same time),
• segmenting (break a complex slide into progressively presented parts),
• pre-training (provide pre-training in the names and characteristics of key concepts),
• modality (present words as spoken text),
• personalization (use conversational language),
• voice (use appealing human voice),
• image (do not display static image of instructor’s face),
• embodiment (display gesturing instructor),
• and generative activity (add prompts for generative learning activity).

Table 1. Three principles from the Science of Learning

• Dual channels: People have separate channels for processing visual and verbal information
• Limited capacity: People can process only a few items in each channel in working memory at any one time
• Active learning: Meaning learning requires that learners engage in appropriate cognitive processing during learning, including selecting, organizing, and integrating