Seeing what works
Last night I read an article by Ruth Clark in The eLearning Developer's Journal that clarified several things my gut had told me were important to design. Read it yourself, but just to tantalize you, I'll summarize part of her Six Principles of Effective e-Learning: What Works and Why.
Over the past decade, Richard Meyer and colleagues at U.C. Santa Barbara have measured the effectiveness of text, graphics, and sound in multimedia learning. He found that:
- A combination of text and relevant graphic improves learning 89% over text-only.
- Animation with narration (sound) was 80% more effective than animation with written captions. Caution: using both sound and a written caption overloads the senses and degrades learning performance.
- Too much is too much. Superfluous graphics cut learning rates in half. Similarly, students learned 69% better with lessons that were light on text than on full-bodied versions.
- Treat the learner as a human being, using you and I, informality, and a human-life avatar or guide, and learning increases.
Posted by Jay Cross at September 14, 2002 03:44 PM
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