How to Avoid Overloading Your Learners With Your Presentation Design
In trying to design effective training presentations and online course content, I have found it most applicable to look to the both the field of UX Design as well as educational psychology. In this article, I will lean more upon the field of educational psychology, as I explore some concepts that can help you to make more effective presentations for your learners. Supporting this discussion is a paper, published by Richard Mayer and Roxana Moreno in the Educational Psychologist, called Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning. This paper in particular has been most helpful in providing general principles that will ensure your presentations are designed in a way that is ideal for learners to retain the information that is being presented.
Drawing from Mayer and Moreno, I would specifically like to discuss using the modality effect in your presentation designs. Most of Mayer and Moreno’s theories are based on the premise of cognitive load. If you haven’t come across the concept before, it is essentially concerned with the amount of processing our brains have to do at any given time while receiving information. Different types of stimuli, visual and auditory, can effectively overload one’s cognitive capacities at a given time and cause issues with knowledge acquisition. Depending on the care given when designing a presentation, this principle of cognitive load can easily be ignored and violated.
In the domain of cognitive load, the modality effect refers to situations where words are presented as narration rather than on-screen text. Think about how many PowerPoint presentations you have seen that simply put up the words that are being narrated on the slide or put up words that are slightly different than what is being narrated. In another study by Mayer and Moreno, students were given lessons as animation and narration instead of animation and on-screen text. Students performed better in situations where the animation was paired with narration rather than the on-screen text. By removing the on-screen text, we can reduce the amount of processing that students have to do in the visual channel
Practically, this is an easy concept to implement in your presentations. Look for places where you have animations and images that are paired with on-screen text and allow the narration to cover anything that the learner needs to remember or write down. Just keep in mind that your learners can’t read the slide and write at the same time! However, they can process animations (visual channel) and narration (auditory). Also, note that you will want to find images that are relevant to what you are discussing and not just there in a decorative capacity. Decorative images that have no relevance to the content of the narration can also lead to learners experiencing cognitive overload.
With goal of helping you see the modality effect in action, I created an example where I applied the modality effect to a presentation on statistical measures that I was developing for a project.
I also created an “bad” example with the same content, but using narration and on-screen text (no animation). Watch both videos and experience the difference in how you are processing the content.
Notice, in the presentation which I used the modality effect there are basically no words on the slide accompanying what the speaker is trying to illustrate. In one brief instance of the presentation, I added the words “used BMI” next to the image of the scientist. However I was careful in my selection here, as the words match up with the narrator and allow the learner to further differentiate which image corresponds to the research group that used BMI as a statistical measure. Also, I used a dimming effect to further signal to the learner that the speaker was referring to the researcher image on the left in the presentation. The combination of using a selective amount of words and some animations greatly enhance the story the the narrator is trying to tell the learner.
Generally, it is easier to design these types of presentations in a tool such as Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline. However, with more effort, you can also design these types of presentations in PowerPoint. There are a few reasons why I recommend using an eLearning authoring tool such as Captivate or Storyline over PowerPoint. Foremost, The timeline feature in both tools makes it really easy to match up the animations you are trying to create with the narrator’s voice. In Articulate Storyline, you also have the layers feature, which is also using for showing a progression of images with narration. In PowerPoint, you are usually resigned to adding a ton of slides to time the narration with animations. Otherwise, your workspace will get too cluttered.
I recommend starting to experiment with principles such as the modality effect using existing trainings that you have already developed and are looking to spruce up. It is a lot less intimidating to apply a new concept to something already developed since you will not be burdened with thinking as much about the other development aspects of the training and can really focus on the application of the concept. Making a few applications, without overburdening yourself too much will make this concept a tool that you can start to do without thinking too hard about how to do it.
