The video that I chose was the one my partner and I have created for an IDE Festival in the topic “Collaborating and connecting through resilience” when we were in Dental Assisting School. This video’s purpose was to inform new born parents about baby bottle syndrome and how it can affect their baby’s teeth. I have kept in mind Mayer’s Multimedia Theory and went ahead to edit a couple changes according to Mayer’s principles. 

The first edit I made was the cover page. The title of the text initially has a font where it was a little difficult to read so I went ahead and made all the font the same to make it easy for viewers to see. 

Before

After

The second edit I made was with its contrast. According to what we’ve learned, contrast is an important design principle because it lets you draw out the most important elements of a design and add emphasis as well as high contrast can help guide the viewer’s eyes to the most important parts of your design first. So here, I have changed the background color to a more vivid blue and paired it with a contrasting yellow to catch the reader’s eyes. This also adds the signaling principle where people learn better when cues are added to highlight the organization of the essential information (Mayer, 2014). 

Before

After

The other factor that I would have also changed in this video is leaving out more negative space to create shapes that can help highlight the most important pieces of information in my video. I find that because we were trying to incorporate all the information needed, it was a little clustered together where we felt the need to include as much information as possible in every slide. The factors that I would not change is the narration. According to Mayer’s 12 principles of multimedia presentations, it states that people learn better when the narration in multimedia lessons is spoken in a friendly human voice rather than a machine voice (Mayer, 2007). According to Mayer’s multimedia principle, people also learn better from words and pictures than from words alone, therefore, I will keep that aspect of having both words and pictures in my slides. In addition to that, the spatial contiguity principle also emphasizes the importance of placing essential words and graphics close together because people learn better when words and corresponding graphics are physically integrated rather than separated, which was also incorporated in the slides (Mayer, 2014). Reflecting upon this video, I also found that we really tried to incorporate Mayer’s Coherence principle by trying to delete as many extra words, sounds, and graphics off the slides (Mayer, 2014).

References

8 Basic Design Principles To Help You Create Better Graphics (15 min) – These basic principles can make a big difference in the look and feel of your media/multimedia materials. (There may be some repetition here, but it’s good to see other examples)

Mayer, R. E. (2007). Five features of effective multimedia messages: An evidence-based approach. In Fiore, S. M., & Salas, E. (Eds.). Toward a science of distributed learning (pp. 171–184). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Mayer, R. E., & Fiorella, L. (2014). Principles for reducing extraneous processing in multimedia learning: Coherence, signaling, redundancy, spatial contiguity, and temporal contiguity. In R.E. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning (pp. 279-315). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.