
In the video Personalization Principle, Richard Mayer, American educational psychologist, talks about using conversational style language. In the video, he explains how changing “the” to “your” makes the instruction more personalized to the learner. This is a great tip when creating instructional design models for learners, especially material with step by step instructions. In a different video, Mayer and Clark explain to be cautious while using conversational language not to be too informal.
This week while working on my project, I removed the speech-to-text narration and used my own voice to narrate the slides. While I do not prefer to hear myself speak, it is a lot better than using the computerized voice. What made it worse is that the entire week I’ve been fighting a sinus cold so my voice would sound hoarse at certain parts of my recordings and I pieced together some of the narration rather than saying everything again. This required meticulous attention to detail to ensure the audio ran smoothly together. I need to make sure I am consistent with recording in Adobe Captivate or iMovie because they each pick up audio differently.

According to the cognitive theory of learning, learners cannot process information by visually looking at graphics and trying to read text on the screen (Clark & Mayer, 2016). Therefore, using audio speech rather than text on the screen allows both the auditory/verbal channel and visual/pictorial channel to be used with visual graphics. Within my Adobe Captivate module, I created three slides this week with animation, narration, and music.
One website I came across this week while preparing for my design was by Visme, 9 Top Graphic Designers Share Their Best Advice for Non-Designers. There were some great tips such as:
- Be clear and concise with communication.
- Simple slides with strong visuals
- Try replicating designs that have already been created
- Design for the end user, empathize with who they are
- Infographics should make data interesting, visual and easy to process
- Adapt to what is going on in the current times
Reference
9 Top Graphic Designers Share Their Best Advice for Non-Designers. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://visme.co/blog/graphic-designers/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
Clark, R. C., Mayer, R. E., (2016). e-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning, third edition (4th ed.). San Francisco, Calif: Pfeiffer.
Mayer & Clark Personalization Principle [Video file]. (2013, February 15). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WulWTdyiy0&t=133s