Modality & Redundancy

One of the many curve balls that the COVID-19 pandemic through at teachers in the past couple of years was the available and prevalence of online learner for them as professionals as well as the learning they provided to their students. In thinking back on that first "COVID summer" with so many unknowns going on, many professional development and learning opportunities for teachers were presented online to maintain as safe of an environment as possible for our community. I sat through multiple presentations given both synchronously and asynchronously with slides that included graphics, animations, text, and were often also accompany by a live or recorded audio track to further expand on what was being shared. In many of these cases, I experienced an extraneous cognitive overload, but I was not aware of that at the time. I was trying to mentally process the forth coming school year being virtual, hybrid, in-person or some combination of that while looking at, reading, and listening to information on whatever topic or tool was being shared I would often drift off because way too much was going on at once.

The use of graphics, on-screen text, and audio all at the same time fit into Clark & Mayer's modality and redundancy principles and simply explain why I was feeling so disconnected from the learning that summer. The modality principle addresses the use of dual channels for learning by combining audio and visual information to allow the brain to process two representations of information at the same time but in different forms. The redundancy principle addresses the use of audio narration that mimics on-screen text with a graphic that can cause an overload in the visual processing channel as the learner is going back and forth between text and graphic/animation.

In the presentation we were tasked with creating this week, I crafted a video for learners seeking to have a basic understanding of the modality and redundancy principles and how they apply to learning and teaching. The video is a montage of video clips that display students, both young and grown, working in a variety of environments to display the range of application of these two principles. Though this course is aimed at online learning, the same principles apply and are beneficial to any presentation, whether given in-person, live, or pre-recorded in order to provide a successful learning opportunity for all participants.

The presentation can be accessed by clicking HERE or on the image below.