Learning Through Multimedia Design
NYU Class Project, 2023
Online Learning for Higher Education
For this project we were tasked with designing a 6-week, asynchronous online course on the topic of our choosing. My team decided that our course would be for K-12 teachers to learn how to design their curriculum and lessons according to Mayer’s 12 multimedia principles when using ed-tech tools.
Project Plan
After agreeing on our course content, we worked together to make our project plan detailing the initial course goals and objectives as well as our roles and responsibilities. As the project manager I assigned tasks depending on the strengths and skills of my team members. We also came together to decide how we will communicate with one another and deal with risk management. For example, our schedules were very conflicting so as a solution we made sure to use every moment of class time to discuss what needed to be done and when. This strategy paired with biweekly meetings outside of class were successful in keeping us on schedule.
Development
Once the course topic and learning objectives were decided we created a week-by-week outline of materials, assignments, and assessments. Not only was it important for each week to have outcomes that connected to the objectives, but we also needed to ensure that there would be some form of interactivity each week.
We then continued to design our course by creating learning assessments. They include both formative assessments as well as a summative one at the end of the course. We used Universal Design for Learning to guide us in creating assessments that are transparent and relevant to the intended learning outcomes. For the summative assessment we described how it is aligned with our learning objectives as well as instructions, the timeline, and an analytic grading rubric.
Course Prototype
For this project it was a requirement that we create some of the instructional materials ourselves including videos that reflect Mayer’s principles for multimedia learning, and have an associated learning outcome. We were each instructed to create a storyboard and script for a video in our course content. I made mine for the video that was intended to teach about cognitive processing demands as scaffolding for the rest of the course.
Finally, we used Brightspace to prototype our course including a syllabus, an overview of each week, instructional materials, activities, assignments, and assessments. While integrating these things into the LMS, we made sure that the language we used was encouraging and mature for our adult learners as well as information that is segmented and organized for clear understanding.
