Evidence-based principles for how to design effective instructional videos

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).

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