Instructional Solution

ELTECHS have decided to use a video presentation with voice over to explain the role and potential career opportunities for educational technologists. Our multimedia presentation, using Powtoon software, will be a 3–5 minute video in which the definition of an educational technologist will be explained along with career opportunities, salary information, a brief history of the field, and standards that students are expected to meet upon graduation. A multimedia presentation will best serve our target audience, which is prospective students.

According to Mayer, there are principles of multimedia design that will manage essential processing and foster generative processing in learners (Mayer, 2009, p.268). Essential processing is how learners select information to put into working memory, and generative processing is how learners organize and integrate that information into long term memory.

The principles that stand out as being critical for learners in understanding our message are the Redundancy Principle, Modality Principle, and the Multimedia Principle. The Redundancy Principle is one of the principles for reducing extraneous processing, in which “people learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration, and on-screen text. The Modality Principle states that “people learn better from graphics and narration than from animation and on-screen text”, and the Multimedia Principle states that “people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone” (Mayer, 2009, p.268).

In order to avoid extraneous processing and redundancy, we believe that a video with selected on-screen words and voice over is the best way to achieve our goal.

Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia learning (Second). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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