Creating Your Best Videos: Using Mayer’s Multimedia Principles to Enhance Viewer Comprehension of Classroom Videos

Concurrent Session 1
Blended

Brief Abstract

COVID-19 forced instructors to create multimedia content for remote learning on campuses across the country. Unfortunately, most of this content lacked instructional value. This presentation teaches sound multimedia principles to guide the creation of multimedia content, and shows how these research-based concepts can enhance video instruction to increase learner comprehension.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Jerimy Sherin, Oklahoma State University

Jerimy Sherin is the production manager for the Greenwood Center for Online Excellence at the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University. For over nine years, he has worked with faculty to develop multimedia content for online, flipped, and blended courses. He also coordinates the efforts of faculty, video producers, and instructional designers to identify, visualize, and implement opportunities for video creation within all Spears Online courses. He has worked in IT for twenty years, including companies such as HP and AT&T, and has spent over a decade supporting educational institutions. An average of 50 videos per week are created in the studio he operates at the Spears School of Business, and those videos are edited, rendered, and available for streaming within 48 hours of recording. His production unit has created over 13,000 videos for more than 150 different courses. He holds a bachelor’s degree in multimedia journalism and a master’s degree in educational technology.

Extended Abstract

The spread of COVID-19 introduced an enormous number of students to online instruction and multimedia learning and presentations. According to U.S. Census figures, “nearly 93% of people in households with school-age children reported their children engaged in some form of ‘distance learning’ from home” in 2020. Due to the urgent nature of quarantines imposed on campuses across the country, many instructors rushed to create multimedia presentations that ultimately lacked impact and instructional value. Their students found the material cluttered, confusing, or simply dull and lifeless. Using R. E. Mayer’s multimedia principles as a guide, this presentation shows how these research-based concepts can enhance classroom video instruction to increase learner comprehension. This presentation will discuss five principles for eliminating extraneous processing in multimedia content, provide working examples of each principle, with designated time for group discussion of best practices implementing multimedia theory and a question and answer session. Attendees will learn not only what content to include in their videos, but also what content to remove or avoid altogether to create dynamic and impactful videos, increase learner understanding, and foster generative processing.