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Why Use Multimedia in Your Online Classroom?

David Taylor

Senior Advisor EWC

School of Undergraduate Studies

Published: September-October 2008

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-tools

Research

There is consistent and convincing evidence that students learn more from words and pictures than they learn from words alone.  

At least 11 major studies confirm this observation (Mayer, 1989b; Mayer & Anderson, 1991, 1992; Mayer, Bove, Bryman, Mars, & Tapangco, 1996; Mayer & Gallini, 1990; Moreno & Mayer, 1999b, 2002b). In each study, researchers compared the test performance of students who learned from animation and narration versus narration alone or from text and illustrations versus text alone.

In all 11 studies, students who received a multimedia lesson consisting of words and pictures performed better on subsequent tests than students who received the same information in words alone. Across the 11 studies, people who learned from words and graphics produced 55 percent to 121 percent more correct solutions to problems than people who learned from words alone. Across all studies, a median gain of 89 percent was achieved with an effect size of 1.50.

Richard Mayer was the first to study this remarkable difference in learning and termed it the "multimedia effect." In a recent review of Mayer's work, Fletcher and Tobias (2005) wrote: "The multimedia principle, which suggests that learning and understanding are enhanced by adding pictures to text rather than presenting text alone, appears to be well supported by findings from empirical research" (p. 128).  

The multimedia effect has been only the starting point. A further increase in learning has been documented with interactive multimedia (Moreno & Mayer, 1999b) such as learning agents.  

Multimedia and Our Minds  

The human mind has two central memories: working memory and long-term memory. Since 1956 and Miller's "magic 7+2," we have known about the limitations of working memory. At the same time, we also know that working memory is the executive suite of conscious thought and learning. So the goal of managing any learning event is to maximize working memory's limited capacity without overloading it, which shuts down learning.

Long-term memory, on the other hand, has a large storage capacity but is inert. Like a computer's hard drive, the long-term memory serves as a closet. You put stuff in and it hangs there, gathering dust until called up for use. Currently, our understanding of how these two memories work together to produce new learning goes something like this:  

1. The learner must be engaged to attend to new content.
2. Relevant prior knowledge must be awakened so that a connection between the new and old can be made. 
3. Cognitive load must be managed or the learner's attention will fail and learning will cease. This is the primary problem that students face when presented with the "wall of words" in textbooks.
4. New mental models are built as old knowledge and new knowledge are integrated in the short-term memory.  
5. New mental models (new skills, new knowledge, and insights) must then be transferred to long-term memory in a way that they can be retrieved later.  

The Psychological Functions of Graphics 

These are the core stages of learning as we currently understand them: learner attention, prior knowledge activation, cognitive load management, mental model construction, storage, and retrieval. As you see in the accompanying table, multimedia materials complement each of these stages:

Examples of Multimedia in the Classroom 

Teacher-created multimedia can serve a variety of purposes in the classroom:

Welcome Videos for Online Classes: A student's first day of class provides a unique opportunity for online teachers to establish their presence in the online classroom. A warm welcome message is important. But adding voice and image helps the student connect to the course in ways that text alone cannot.

Software Demonstrations: Often, students must develop facility with specific computer software in connection with a course. With the free screen-recording tool described below, instructors can easily make their own demonstrations of how to use course-specific software. 

PowerPoint Lectures: PowerPoint is a tool that many teachers use well. But storing a narrated PowerPoint for student retrieval is unwieldy because of bandwidth and software requirements. A Flash video of a narrated PowerPoint lecture addresses both of those issues by providing a highly compressed, platform-independent presentation. 

Answers to Student FAQs: You may often feel that an entire class could benefit from an answer that you provide to an individual student's question. A quick screen recording allows the teacher to share an audiovisual answer so that the entire class benefits.

Using CamStudio Open Source to Create Multimedia 

Use this tutorial to get started on creating your video introduction and/or a learning activity on the free CamStudio Open Source Free Streaming Software.

Other Resources 

After you have created your video, use these tutorials for creating your Polaris account and using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to create a URL for your students to access your video in the classroom.

• Creating your Polaris Account
• Using CoreFTP - Video | Print

References 

Fletcher, J.D., & Tobias, S. (2005). The multimedia principle. In R.E. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning (pp. 117-134). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mayer, R. E. (1989b). Systematic thinking fostered by illustrations in scientific text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81, 240-246.

Mayer, R.E., & Anderson R. B. (1991). Animations need narrations. An experimental test of dual-processing systems in working memory. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 312-320.

Mayer, R.E., & Anderson R. B. (1992). The instructive animation: Helping students build connections between words and pictures in multimedia learning.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, 444-452.

Mayer, R.E., Bove, W., Bryman, A., Mars, R., & Tapangco, L. (1996). When less is more: Meaningful learning from visual and verbal summaries of science textbook lessons. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 64-73.

Mayer, R.E., & Gallini, J.K. (1990). When is an illustration worth ten thousand words? Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 64-73.

Miller, G.A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-96.

Moreno, R., & Mayer, R.E. (1999b). Multimedia-supported metaphors for meaning making in mathematics. Cognition and Instruction, 17, 215-248.

Moreno, R., & Mayer, R.E. (2002b). Engaging students in active learning: The case for personalized multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93, 724-733