Our plan to design an instructional video will increase knowledge of a career in educational technology among university students and potential recruiters and increase interest in the field. These factors will lead to our goals of having increased enrollment in the educational technology program and increased recruiter attendance at the UTRGV Educational Technology job fair. An instructional video was chosen as the learning design for its accessibility features and the opportunity to present instruction about educational technology in an engaging, concise, and media-centric way.
Our target audience of university students and company recruiters are comfortable with technology and will be prepared to engage in the video format. Features that will make the instructional video accessible to the diverse community include the ability to create closed captioning, transcripts, and voice narration. This will accommodate students or recruiters who may have hearing or visual impairments, or who have a native language other than English.
An instructional video also allows for segmenting, which helps design the information in a logically-paced way that does not create cognitive overload for the audience. The segmenting principle will be utilized to give learners control of pacing through buttons like pause, play, rewind, and fast forward. “The rationale for segmented lessons is that they allow the learner to completely digest one segment of the lesson before moving on”, which is helpful when information is unfamiliar to a learner (Fiorella & Mayer, 2018). Although the video will only be 3 to 5 minutes long, integrating accessibility features for a wide range of student backgrounds is necessary to facilitate learning.
An instructional video was chosen as the platform of our learning design to promote engagement. “[V]ideo is seen as having advantages for engagement in some specific ways, notably in widening participation, emotional engagement and overall course engagement” (Carmichael et. al).
We will further enhance engagement through the use of multimedia in the instructional video, which is a key reason this learning design was selected. Richard Mayer’s multimedia learning principle states that people learn better from words and images rather than words alone (Mayer, 2017). Through the use of multimedia in the instructional video, learner understanding will increase. A multimedia video also allows for voice narration to accompany visuals. Research has shown that voice narration accompanying visuals is more effective than voice narration, on-screen text, and visuals (Mayer, 2017). In addition, using multimedia features in video engages our audience. For example, infographics share data and research about careers in educational technology in a concise, visual format.