8847+for+Coherence

Click here to see the example of how a multimedia presentation violates Mayer's (2009) Coherence principle.



Coherence Principle

I have taken just 2 slides out of an entire multimedia presentation that my company uses to train instructors around the world.

The presentation violates Mayer's (2009) principles in many ways. To just highlight how it violates the coherence principle:

a. In the first slide, the big B, the words "Basic Steps 1" and the Zumba logo are distracting and not part of the instructional message.

b. The picture of Beto is almost distracting only because it is a "pose" of him being "cool" which can be distracting.

c. The second slide is just about self explanatory. The purpose of the slide is to teach someone how to, on their own, draw stick figures, while music plays. For example, the man says "Fuego, Fuego" which means fire. In the presentation, a cute fire flame appears and people watch it and probably think it is quite clever, but it has nothing to do with the instructional message. Again the background template is also distracting.

Here is a presentation about social networking sites and the classroom.

http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=188607&title=Social_networking_in_the_classroom

The second slide violate's Mayer's (2009) principle of coherence in several ways:

a. It contains a picture that is not very relevant to the purpose of the slide. b. It contains a background picture which is distracting. c. It has many words on the screen - probably all of them not needed, particularly the slide #s.

The sixth slide entitled: Importance of recognizing SNS:

a. It has a background picture of an iPhone which may be distracting. b. It has many words on the screen that one would read instead of listening to the speaker. c. It has a comic strip that a learner would rather read than hear the speaker.

Reference Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.