Reprinted with permission from JC Kinnamon, Ph.D of Midicorp

INTERACTIVE INSIGHTS

VOLUME 6: ISSUE 1
January, 2003

*** MULTIMEDIA LEARNING ***

by JC Kinnamon, Ph.D.
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According to Cecil Adams, the creator of www.straightdope.com, when rocker Steve Miller penned the words to "The Joker," his 1970s hit, he apparently "borrowed" a line from an earlier R&B tune by lyricist Vernon Green of the '50s doo-wop group The Medallions. As the story goes, Miller misheard a word ("puppetutes") that Green made up. As a result, Miller unintentionally gave us a rock-and-roll mystery in the form of the meaning of the lyric, "Some people call me the space cowboy. / Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love. / Some people call me Maurice, / Cause I speak of the Pompatus of love."

As I illustrated last month, pop stars aren't the only ones not checking their sources -- the convenience of the Internet has contributed to the proliferation of much misinformation and, as a result, a fair share of educational malpractice. Over a series of articles in upcoming months, I'll try to shed some light on how the practice of developing e-learning should be influenced by empirically based findings -- not urban legends, anecdotes or misinformation.

MULTIMEDIA LEARNING
We begin our research odyssey this month with Richard Mayer and what he calls multimedia learning. Mayer and his colleagues have spent a decade investigating the way people use multimedia materials to learn about how things work. Mayer defines multimedia as any presentation using words and pictures. Words are any material presented in verbal form -- printed text or spoken text. Pictures include static graphics, animations or video.

For their studies, Mayer and his colleagues created instructional materials on subjects such as how a car braking system works or how lightning storms form. They then manipulated various instructional design variables, such as presence or absence of text, pictures, and narration. For each study, Mayer measured learning two ways: retention (how well someone remembered what was learned) and transfer (how well the knowledge learned was applied to another situation).

COGNITIVE THEORY OF MULTIMEDIA LEARNING
Mayer has concluded that there is convincing evidence to support a cognitive theory of multimedia learning. What is a cognitive theory of multimedia learning? According to Mayer, it is an explanation for how people learn that hinges on three assumptions:
#1. Humans use one "channel" for processing visual information and a second one for processing auditory information.
#2. There is a limit to how much information can be processed in each channel at a time.
#3. Humans are active processors of information, not passive receptors.

Mayer's research on the cognitive theory of multimedia learning provides practitioners with some solid guidance on the instructional design of e-learning applications.

DOES MULTIMEDIA WORK?
A fundamental question is whether a multimedia approach is even necessary. Does multimedia -- defined as a combination of visuals and words -- produce better learning than a word-only presentation? Without this evidence, it may be a waste of time and money to do anything with your e-learning application other than put text on the screen for the learner to read. In a series of studies, Mayer and his associates assessed subjects on retention and transfer when visuals were added to word-only instructional segments. The researchers found a robust benefit resulted from adding pictures to word-only presentations. With positive results from a very basic question, Mayer went on to explore more specific questions. This month we'll explore one; next month we'll cover more.

ARE ON-SCREEN TEXT AND NARRATED TEXT EQUIVALENT?
Consider the e-learning developer who has to decide whether it is worth the trouble to record narration to supplement visuals used to teach a subject. Is there any difference between having the learner read the text on-screen vs. listening to a narrator read it? It is, after all, the same information.

In four experiments, Mayer and his colleagues compared two instructional conditions: one used animation with narration; the other used animation with on-screen text. In both conditions, the same animation was shown, and the narrated text in the first condition was identical to the on-screen text in the second condition.

Mayer found subjects in the animation-with-narration condition retained 30% more than the subjects in the animation-and-text condition. In a transfer test assessing how well the subjects could apply what they learned to a novel situation, the subjects in the narrated condition generated, on average, 80% more creative solutions than the subjects in the animation-with-text condition. This latter finding is particularly meaningful because it suggests the subjects in the animation-with-narration condition possessed a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Mayer's explanation, consistent with the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, is that subjects in the animation-with-text condition ran into a limited-capacity problem trying to absorb all the information through the visual channel. Subjects in the animation-with-narration condition did not; consequently, they were able to learn the material better. Thus there is clear evidence, with a firm theoretical foundation, that adding audio to your e-learning application can improve learning. It's worth noting that this conclusion is not based on a single study, but four studies that produced the same effect.

Consider this line of research when your IT department plans a major upgrade of equipment across the enterprise but doesn't want to fund sound cards and speakers or headphones for the new computers. The research provides guidance: if those computers are going to be used for online training applications, learning will be handicapped by the absence of audio-capable computers. Also, consider this line of research when someone tells you that text works just as well as a media-enhanced approach. There is evidence to the contrary.

In a bit of serendipity, a popular electronic newsletter to which I subscribe recently carried a discussion of this issue. One practitioner asked an innocent-enough question: is it necessary to have audio in e-learning applications? The responses reported in subsequent editions of the newsletter were evenly divided pro and con. Most replies were thoughtful enough and many people had opinions on the matter, but in keeping with the theme of this current Interactive Insights series, no one cited a single empirically-based study in response to the reader's query.

Next month: Under what conditions does multimedia work?

REFERENCES
Mayer, R.E. (2001) "Multimedia Learning." Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.