Friday, April 03, 2009

Visuals and Audio in eLearning (Ruth Clark)

Donald Clark posted a link to a lovely little article by Ruth Clark: Give Your Training a Visual Boost in the April 09 edition of ASTD's T&D.

The article contains such gems as:

"Decorative visuals defeat learning."

and

"The least successful learning resulted from text and audio repetition of that text."

This would be a great article to forward to a client.  You know the one.  They want  audio narrating that long paragraph of text that they think should also appear on the screen in order to appeal to different learning styles...

3 comments:

Robert Kennedy said...

This is good stuff Cammy. I did something similar just the other day - Can You Hear Me Now. But Ruth Clark's POV adds another dimension to my stated thoughts about it. Yip, I just might send this article over to the next client that asks for this :-).

Jane Bozarth said...

This comes up every few months on training-related discusssion sites and in LinkedIn questions. I cite Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer (and their book together, the great "E-Learning and the Science of Instruction"), and Sweller, and Nguyen... People ask for the 'research' but then they don't like the data when it's provided. Problems include the desire to narrate every word (when there are already too many words) and the belief that adding any visual will "appeal" to "visual learners".

But keep spreading the word!

MCSE_Karrox said...

I am a Professor by profession and I feel that using the latest technologies such as Audio, Video, Electronic banners help the learner to get engaged, resulting is more knowledge transfer.