Individual Design Project EDUC 893 Mohammed Abu Aish Cognitive tools and Multimedia learning Dr John Nesbit Summer 2008
Introduction: Millions of people use Microsoft Power Point every day to prepare and deliver their presentations. This program has succeeded to attract people from all ages and all careers to prepare their presentations. Power Point use in education is similar to any other educational technology; it can be used in a good way or a bad way. We all remember amazing presentations and remember disastrous ones as well The ironic fact is that, many of us who complained and criticized a presenter in the past, commit the same mistakes when it comes to our own presentations, so why did not learn form others’ mistakes We know that our working memory is of limited capacity (Baddeley, 1986, 1999) and can only hold few elements of information at the same time (Miller, 1956), so it is possible that the context of observing a lecture with mistake is too busy with multiple extraneous and essential cognitive loads (Paas , Renkl & Sweller, 2003)(understanding the slides, criticizing them, listening to the presenter, thinking about lunch..Etc) to enable our working memory to hold enough information and then form a meaningful mental model than can help us when it comes to designing our own presentations This always brought a question to me: How can we better teach presentation skills in a way that enables us to retain the simple rules of preparing a good presentations and practice some successful strategies when we talk in front of the audience
My design is a simple module trying to help scaffold the learner practice and learn how to prepare good slides using Microsoft Power Point and to deliver effective presentations afterwards. Learning Context: This module can be used by anyone interested in learning how to be a better presenter. It is not designed to teach how to use Power Point as a software but rather to teach few good choices when it comes to designing a presentation with Power Point. These good choices are supposed to make the slides clear and readable, easy to follow and understand and acceptable by the target audience. The module is designed to be used as an interactive checklists of the steps required to prepare good slides, the user has the choice to prepare his/her slides before using the module or open both the flash module and the Power Point slides at the same time and work step by step. The module can be used by itself without Power Point if the learner wishes to review the steps of preparing good slides at his/her own leisure My target audience is the medical students rotating in my department and my colleagues who wish to practice and review these skills. Since I want some of my older physicians to use this module, and knowing the attention span of my older physician colleagues, I intentionally made the design simple and quick to review in few minutes to avoid cognitively overload them
Once I finish my design, I will upload it on all the computers in the Pediatric Emergency Department at BC Children’s Hospital. Learners then can access the module any time throughout the day when they have free time. I will later upload this design on webCT so the learners can access it from their homes. Target Task: The target is to avoid common mistakes that presenters frequently do when they prepare their presentations. There are many workshops offered at universities and online to teach this topic but they all have one common problem, they do not tailor the instruction to the individuals attending, some learners need more scaffolding than others to achieve the same goal. If we apply a universal teaching strategy to the whole group we may end up with the expertise reversal effect (Kalyuga, Ayres, Chandler & Sweller, 2003) where some students only require the quick reminder of the steps needed to build a good presentations while others need deep instruction with multiple figures and examples to achieve the same goal The aim is to have this module as a reference and a checklist that can be referred to before/or while preparing Power Point presentations. The user will use this module initially to review his/her slides and make sure they follow the general rules discussed. With multiple uses and the learner will hopefully integrate these skills in his/her long‐term memory as a schema (Chi, Glasser & Rees. 1982) that will be retrieved and implemented when preparing future presentations.
The module scaffolds the learner to learn at his own pace, the learner can spend only few minutes to go through the multiple steps of designing effective slides, or he/she can spend longer time to use the interactive features of the module to achieve a deeper understanding of the concepts Learning Task: I initially designed this module using Power Point and used to teach the topic at interactive workshops to medical students and residents. The way the workshops used to run is by showing the students different slides and discuss what do they think about them. The slides were all busy and difficult to read and understand to trigger the students to criticize and explore the faults in preparing them. After we discuss the problems of the slides, I then show the students similar slides with similar contents but with major modifications and get them to compare the differences. These workshops are popular and very interactive but the question was always about transfer, there was no guarantee that the students will actually implement what they have learned to their own presentations I added to my Power Point slides some interactivity with the use of buttons and triggers to be able to post the slide show in the department’s computers to allow the students to access the workshop at any time and navigate at their own pace. Segmenting (Mayer, 2005) the presentation to multiple parts that the user can navigate through at his/her own pace was mainly to avoid the essential overload that can result from discussing the workshop with multiple students. We also added narration to the slides to maximize the use of auditory and visual channels to better
integrate a mental model as suggestive by Mayer’s Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2005) and Paivio Dual Coding Theory (Paivio, 1986) I faced two problems though: Power Point did not give me the required interactive features to allow the student to get feedback apart from the navigational aspects of the buttons added. Second, students faced difficulties when they wanted to use the module to compare their own slides since they had to open 2 Power Point presentations at the same time. I then decided to use flash CS3 to design a simple, interactive module that can be used individually by the student at his/her own pace and in the same time can be used simultaneously while using Power Point Individuals can use the module in 3 different ways: Level one: the learner can just use the navigational properties on the top of the page to scan the module and review the main steps of designing effective slides. Each of these steps is put as a title of a new page: e.g. step 1 is choosing your background and text color, step 2 is choosing the right font and text size etc. Level two: the learner may want to learn more about each step, he/she can then choose to read the text underneath the title and/or click the play head to listen to an audio giving instructions Level three: if the learner wants to use all the features of the module, he/she can read the text and or the audio and then interact with the examples provided underneath the text field. All examples give some degree of feedback when clicked
but with minimal adaptation as the aim of the module is to scaffold the learner build his own slides on Power Point not on Flash, the learner can open the Power Point window in the same time and transfer what he/she learns immediately to Power Point. Learning Resource: Content Quality: The contents are derived from multiple published articles discussing presentation skills and designing effective slides. I used different expert’s opinion on the topic among which is Dr Niranjaan Kissoon, a professor of Pediatrics who organized a similar workshop for medical professional for long time I collected multiple workshop data and different presenters evaluations to review the common themes of criticism poor presenters face as well as using the faculty development office at UBC guidelines for effective presentations I used few experts presentations from different courses and conferences I attended to collect my data before implementing the Power Point or the flash Module. So, overall the data presented in these modules can be considered as experts’ consensus opinion about this topic Learning goal alignment: The goal is stated clearly on the front page; designing effective presentations, it is then divided to 2 major sub goals; preparing good slides and effective delivery. I wrote these sub goals clearly on the front page and all throughout the module
underneath the navigational bar. I made the design simple enough to avoid distractions for the main goal Feedback and Adaptation: On each page the learner will be able to scroll to read the text explaining the idea and click to hear the corresponding narration audio. I made the audio file click optional to avoid redundancy if I force the reader of the text to listen to the audio file in the same time. The lower half of each page contains interactive examples to allow the learner to experience and practice what is written or said about the point of instruction The ability of the learner to see the pictures underneath the text is designed to achieve spatial contiguity when text and graphics are presented on the same screen to further reduce the cognitive loading (Sweller, 1999) Since narration can be better than text as the Modality principle suggest (Allport, Antonis & Reynolds, 1972, Rollins & Thibadeau, 1973, Shaffer, 1975, Dennis, 1977, Rollins & Hendricks, 1980 Davis, 1973), we added the ability to hear the instruction on each individual page, the audio file was a single long file in the original Power Point module, we divided it to smaller segments and added each segments to the corresponding page in the flash module During the audio playback, the learner will still be able to play with the examples and pictures adding a Temporal contiguity feature to the design when narration and animations run at the same time although one can argue that playing the audio file
can be asynchronous with the animations, this is true if the audio files or the animations are long but the fact that I made the animations brief and the audio files short make synchronicity easy to achieve just by playing the file again and again Most of the feed back is achieved with buttons responding to the leaner’s choice or click either by displaying a hidden message or by showing some modification to an existing slide to enable the learner to directly compare the difference, a feature that was difficult to achieve with the Power Point module There is no much adaptation in the module, as the learner is not building his/her actual presentation in Flash. The module just scaffolds the learner to implement what he learned on Power Point Motivation: I tried to make the design as simple as possible to avoid extrinsic cognitive overload. Only relevant graphics were added to achieve coherence (Mayer et al, 1996, Harp & Mayer 1997, Moreno & Mayer 2000, Mayer, Heiser & Lonn, 2001). Because some of my target audience are the older physicians group in my hospital who are typically busy and rushed, I made the design flexible to time constraints. You can spend only 5 minutes to navigate through this module or 30 minutes playing with all the features. You can navigate to he next point or to any point in the module directly or choose to follow the step‐by‐step approach
I am positive that this module will engage my target audience due to the importance of the topic in the lives and careers of physicians and with the simple interface, I am sure it will attract all ages. Presentation design: The design is uncomplicated as I mentioned, self explanatory with the addition of the navigational buttons on top and the sub‐goals underneath the navigational buttons. The instructional boxes are scrollable to add more space to the action stage underneath. I needed to have a bigger space for the action stage to be able to post snapshots from actual slides and to give space for the feedback messages to appear when the learner interacts with the questions and animations. The ability to go back and forth continuously and repeat what you just did or play the audio files again all help to enable to learner to move at his/her own pace (segmenting principle) (Mayer & Chandler 2001, Mayer, Dow & Mayer 2003), construct his own knowledge and overcome the essential cognitive overload that can result from discussing the same topic in a joined workshop with many people around The design contains graphics, text and audio and video files all in a common and simple formats, the files uploaded are small and do not cause a delay in playback Interaction usability
The design is very easy to navigate through, the navigation bar is clear on top with the button being highlighted once clicked which enables the learner to know where is he exactly in the module and how much progress he already made. This feature distinguish the module from the module I used in Power Point and adds credit to both the motivational aspect and the interaction usability of my design. I made all the buttons to give immediate feedback with no delays or transitional effects to add to the simplicity of the design and to avoid unnecessary delays during the navigational process Accessibility: Apart from the addition of audio to the learners with visual disabilities and the text for the learners with hearing disabilities, there is no other accessibility feature in the design due to my limited programming experience Reusability: Different learners can use the design at different times. The design is simple enough to attract all ages and relevant enough to different specialties and careers. I did not initially add audio files thinking to use the module only at the local computers at the Emergency department as these computers audio is muted at all times but decided later to add them to make the module accessible by larger audience especially when I upload it on WebCT I will add the multilingual text later once I learn XML or with the help of my colleagues in class
Standard compliance; The text input is an embedded using XML language; I did not publish the design yet to test for standards compliance Conclusion: Many people use Power Point to prepare their presentations but not all know how to use it to build effective presentations. The sad thing is that most mistakes that presenters do are easy to avoid and fix. I designed this module to help busy presenters check their presentations and make sure they avoided these mistakes. It will help remind people who know what is right and will gently direct others who needed some scaffolding and guidance Different aspect of multimedia learning theory were considered when designing this module to assure maximum integration of words and images to build an effective mental model without cognitively overload the learner If I had more flash experience, I would have let the learner build the whole presentation in flash templates that look similar to PowerPoint before getting a detailed feed back on his performance, it will be nice if one can build a tool to scan the Power Point slides and suggests modifications to the organizational aspects of the slides and not only the grammar and spelling mistakes.
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