Mayer's Multimedia Design Principles

This note last modified August 17, 2021

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sort of a gestalt, but for learning

• Multimedia
  • Pictures + Words, rather than just words (dual channel theory)
• Spatial
  • put things near each other
• Temporal
  • put things near each other
• coherence
  • remove extraneous things
• modality
  • animation and narration rather than animation and text
• redundancy
  • animation and narration rather than animation, text, and narration (hilarious how the bullet on redundancy feels redundant)
• individuality
  • instructional design makes more of an impact on high knowledge learners (does this mean smart learners, or learners with a lot of background…)
• signaling
  • underlining + arrows
• pacing
  • let students control pacing
• concepts first
  • learning - pretrain
• personalization
  • use “you” or “yours”
• human voice
  • no machine voice or foreign accents