Speaker 1: Hi, my name's Mike Tyler, and in this video, and the series following it, I'm going to be introducing you to Richard Mayer's 12 Multimedia Instructional Principles. What's this video series about? Well, the 12 Multimedia Instructional Principles are intended to help you make better online learning materials. These videos are going to include some explanations of the principles, one principle per video, alongside examples, both positive and negative, that hopefully will help make things nice and clear for you. The 12 principles come from Richard Mayer, an educational psychologist from the United States, from his integration of three key theories in educational psychology, and those theories are Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory, Paivio's Dual Coding Theory, and Baddeley's Model of Working Memory. From the combination of these, Mayer produced the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning relies on two key ideas. The first key idea is that we process sense data through two primary channels in our working memory. The visual channel is concerned mostly with graphical information and operates synchronously, whereby the structure and the layout of a slide or a diagram can kind of be taken in at a glance. The verbal channel, which is of course concerned with words, works sequentially. And so the two channels have a different role to play when it comes to learning. The second key idea is that both of these channels are very limited and easily overloaded. So to navigate these two things, it's better for your learners to present coherent information simultaneously to these two channels, rather than presenting it separately to either channel. When Mayer and Anderson in 1992 compared learning via visual and verbal modalities, and various possible combinations of those modalities, they found that dual-coded teaching and learning materials, that is, those which take into account the limited processing capacity of working memory, and uses both channels simultaneously, those materials were just as powerful as single modality teaching when it comes to retention. However, what's really important is, due to the referential connections made between the visual and the verbal, learning acquired via dual-coded materials could be shown to be far better when it comes to transfer, when it comes to problem-solving, and when it comes to that ever-elusive educational holy grail, creativity. This isn't the format to go into great depth on the topic, but if you do want further details, take a look at Richard Mayer's 2009 work, Multimedia Learning. The 12 principles can be grouped according to their main purpose. The first group of five principles, the coherence principle, the signaling principle, the redundancy principle, the spatial contiguity principle, and the temporal contiguity principle. This group is focused on reducing extraneous processing, that is, the removal of anything extraneous both in terms of content and mode of presentation. This matches Sweller's notion of extraneous load. The second group of principles, three principles in this group, this group is focused on managing essential processing, that is, once the extraneous material has been discarded, how do I then best present what is to be learned? And this is what Sweller calls intrinsic load. And finally, the last group, which is a group of four principles, is focused on fostering generative processing. What this means is helping our students to organize and to integrate the material in the working memory, ready for encoding into existing schemas. This is essentially a description of what Sweller's cognitive load theory would describe as germane load. Check out the videos for each of these principles, and let me know if you have any questions that I can help you with or that I can point you in the right direction with. Well, I hope that's been helpful to you. See you in the next video.