Topic 3 – Multimedia Learning & H5P

Multimedia Learning

I think that multimedia learning theory can help educators create more effective instructional videos and tutorials because it highlights what not to do. The video we watched by Dr. Ray Pastore was quite a good example of what to avoid when creating instructional videos, he started by explaining what the multimedia principle was and what theories support it, and then went into techniques that are commonly used but work against effective learning. He mentioned the split attention principle, modality affect, redundancy principle, and many more. Unfortunately as he was describing what these were he demonstrated the exact techniques that can inhibit learning, such as including his talking head, random images, and repeating almost word-for-word what the text on the screen said.

H5P & Video Editing

Media creation is something that will be important for educators in their career, COVID is proof that teachers need to have the ability to pivot from their usual instructional strategies. Today I created an interactive screencast using H5P in WordPress, it is a video in which I am playing a web-browser game and talking over top, I used Zoom’s screen sharing and record function to create this. While creating this video was good practice, I do not think H5P is a tool that I will use very often in my teaching practice. Personally when watching the interactive videos utilized on the course website I found the speech bubbles and quiz to be quite buggy and I think that there are better ways to achieve the same outcome. Especially to do with the multiple choice quiz, the text was very squeezed together which made it difficult to tell what the possible answers were, perhaps this was a user issue, but if I ran into the issue then I am sure at least one of my future students will as well. I would prefer to use google classroom and have a multiple choice quiz built in, and for the text pop-ups I think a caption on the video would suffice for the most part. I have included the video I created below 🙂

A Final Note on Flipped Classrooms

From my understanding a flipped classroom operates similarly to universities (which I guess is a benefit). Basically the students are expected to do most of the learning on their own time and come to class prepared for discussion and deeper learning that would otherwise not be possible if the surface level topics were taught during class time. I think that this idea makes assumptions about students lives that are not always accurate. Flipped classrooms would require students to have enough time after school to accomplish the learning needed for the following day, and not all students have this luxury: they may be involved in sports, the community, have long commutes, or need to work to help out their families. In an idealistic world I could see this working out, but where we are at now in the education system I think this would be a poor replacement for our current teaching methods, if teachers want to dive into the deeper learning then they should ensure that every student is on the same page, and the only way to do that is to teach in the classroom.

How would you as a student like a flipped classroom?