In today’s contemporary world where multimedia is most explored, learning the different principles before creating an effective multimedia tool is a must. As defined, multimedia is a combination of text, pictures, audio, video, and animation to convey a specific learning content. It aims at helping learners to easily process and understand certain explicit and implicit messages. Since learners have varying degrees of understanding due to individual differences, backgrounds, and learning competencies, their needs should be identified and recognized first and foremost. There are learners who learn fast through auditory and/or visual representations and this leads content creators to generate materials that will make use of visual, auditory, and animated means to take learners to better learning experiences.
In this regard, may I present to you Mayer’s 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning that every multimedia learning material creator needs to know. These principles can be classified as (a) Principles for Reducing Extraneous Processing, (b)Principles for Managing Essential Processing, and (c) Principles for Fostering Generative Processing. Under (a), coherence, signaling, redundancy, and spatial contiguity are included. Since use of multimedia tool is tailored for a better learning experience, unnecessary or irrelevant details should be excluded. Also, texts and images should be placed side by side to establish connection between them. (B) principles include segmenting, pre-training, and modality. Learners can learn better if the materials are based on their pace and prior knowledge. Also, the principle of modality tells us that learners learn better through narration and graphics than through animation and on-screen text . (C) principles include multimedia, personalization, voice, and image.
I. myself, learn fast and better from multimedia materials. I am a visual and auditory learner and I tend to capture the message of what I am learning through watching and listening. Videos give me a real-life experience on how to handle things, thus helping me learn in an easier and deeper way.
As a facilitator of learning, I can employ these principles of creating multimedia learning materials to augment the quality and quantity of learning that I desire to offer. These principles will greatly benefit not just me as the facilitator but more so, my students for whom great efforts are intended.
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