Design Rationale

Design Rationale

The team endeavors to create a functionally compelling, engaging, and impactful RLO for Educational Technology program coordinators to provide to potential students. When considering the scope of this project and the target audience, we determined to create an RLO that was functional for distance use and user-friendly for multiple technology skill levels. We decided that a short video presentation would best suit our target audience's needs.

Video presentations are an effective multimedia format. They are familiar to many learners and are straightforward to use while still remaining engaging. Video presentations are effective multimedia solutions allowing users some control and allowing creators to utilize multimedia design best practices.

Supporting Research

We follow closely the multimedia learning principles and best practices established by Richard E. Mayer’s research. According to his work and his Cognitive Theory of Learning, learners have dual-channel processing, or they can only process through two senses at a time, have limited capacity, and engage in active processing (Mayer, 2009). The implications for this RLO are that audio and visual channels of processing will be utilized effectively without creating cognitive overload. Audio overlay in the video will compliment online animation with limited visual text. We will thus also be in line with Mayer’s principles of Temporal Contiguity and his Modality Principle.

Reference

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