Module 1: what multimedia learning actually claims

The claim that stopped me this week was the redundancy principle: that reading text aloud while the same text is on screen makes learning worse, not better. It is counter-intuitive. Every set of slides I have ever sat through does exactly that.

The explanation is that the visual and auditory channels each have limited capacity, and identical text in both spends that capacity twice for no gain. What convinced me was trying it: I recorded the same ninety-second explanation twice, once reading my slides and once with the slides reduced to a single diagram. The second version is shorter, and I can follow it without effort.

What I would change

Next time I will draft the narration first and let the visuals follow, rather than writing slides and then reading them. Sample post — replace with your own writing.