Color in Multimedia Instruction

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

Principles for Instructional Videos

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

Active and Transformative Learning

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

Learning Styles vs. Variety for Learning

You may have heard about learning styles and thought you should consider them in planning your course. However, you may also get overwhelmed knowing where to start. A Google search on ‘learning styles inventories’ will get over 110,000,000 hits.  An ERIC search on ‘learning styles inventories’ will get almost 1,000 results. Five of the most … Read more

10 Actions to Help Student Readiness

Both my kids went away to university for their first year. They were both miserable and came home for their second year. Part of this was the complete change in social life, but a major part was that they were lost on what was expected of them academically and how to study. First-year students often … Read more

Do You Need 50 CATS?

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

What do you want your students to accomplish?

Identifying Outcomes, Objectives, and Activities in 3 hours While it is tempting to start identifying activities and topics for a course based on your interests and/or what the textbook covers, we really need to step back and identify what students are required to accomplish as a result of taking your course. By analyzing this, we … Read more