Revised on September 25th, 2022.
Have you ever experienced the excruciating pain that is death by a PowerPoint in a required training or professional development? If you haven't then you are surely lucky! With its overkill of text and the speaker reading the screen almost verbatim it could drain the energy out of anyone taking the lesson both virtually and in person. Luckily, the Coherence Principle can help cure death by PowerPoint with its guidelines to exclude extraneous text, graphics, and audio in e-Lessons. Week 4 of Design & Development of Multimedia Instructional Units had us taking these principles discussed by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer and apply them to personal experiences giving examples and non-examples of its use. You can find my personal analysis of the Coherence Principle linked below. I hate to break it to some, but death by PowerPoint extraneous overload is not the way to best help our learners. They reiterate this in their book, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning, by stating: "The coherence principle is important because it is commonly violated, is straightforward to apply, and can have a strong impact on learning..." (page 151, Clark and Mayer). All in all, Clark and Mayer are wanting us to get the most return out of our investment for learners and learning outcomes.
Thanks for sticking with me for yet another week as I continue through this journey. It's hard to believe I am already half way through the course. As always: Geaux Tigers!
Reference:
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. Wiley.
DeBell, Andrew. How to use Mayer's 12 Principles of Multimedia. Water Bear Learning. https://waterbearlearning.com/mayers-principles-multimedia-learning/
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