Last month I compared and combined three articles on the principles for multimedia instructional videos. One of the common principles was about color use. This month I reviewed over a dozen articles on color use in instruction and found the following: According to Misanchuk & Schwier (2009) The following are extracted from a list of … Read more
In this blog, I compare three articles on best practices/principles for designing instructional videos and provide a list of matching principles that may help you design your instructional videos. These can be applied with the WCAG accessibility guidelines and general good design principles. There are dozens of research articles about the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia … Read more
We talk with our students about plagiarism, but how do we fare ourselves? When we are creating documents, webpages, slides, etc., do we consider the sources for our images, videos, or sounds? It is tempting to take an image we see in Google and copy and paste it where we want it. Chances are pretty … Read more
Although some people refer to active learning and transformational learning as the same thing, I think we should differentiate… Active learning [emphasis added] is generally defined as any instructional method that engages students in the learning process. In short, active learning requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing… … Read more
On more than one occasion, I have been assigned a course to teach with less than two weeks’ notice. As I had never taught this course before, I didn’t have enough time to plan the entire semester (in one instance I hadn’t read the assigned text and didn’t have a copy!). To give myself breathing … Read more
Angelo & Cross’s Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATS) Most instructors are truly trying to provide a good learning experience for their students. An obvious method for determining success is to look at student grades. However, this is a reactive approach, rather than proactive, and may not tell you WHY the students are learning/not learning. A proactive … Read more