E-Learning Principles

For my E-Learning course, I had to create a storyboard for a lesson.  For my lesson, I chose to teach how to make shrimp fettuccine.  (My previous post shows the steps for the process of making shrimp fettuccine.)  In my lesson, I had to incorporate some e-learning principles to ensure student success.  As with learning any new skills, the segmentation principle was needed so that students can learn the material step by step and not become frustrated or overwhelmed.  Deeper processing will occur this way.  The pretraining principle is necessary since some students will need particular background knowledge or key concepts explained before they can begin learning the new material.   “The pretraining principle is relevant in situations when trying to process the essential material in the lesson would overwhelm the learner’s cognitive system (Clark & Mayer, 2011, Ch. 10, para. 14). Pretraining promotes critical thinking skills in that it helps “beginners to manage their processing of complex material by reducing the amount of essential processing they do at the time of the presentation” (Clark & Mayer, 2011, Ch. 10, para. 14).  My lesson followed the multimedia principle by including graphics and text or graphics with audio.  More critical thinking and processing will occur through graphics with text or audio rather than text alone.  In accordance to the contiguity principle, my lesson had relevant text next to the graphics.  Having integrated text will reduce the chance of “extraneous processing—cognitive processing that is unrelated to the instruction goal” (Clark & Mayer, 2011, Ch. 5, para. 22) which will open the mind up for deeper processing and higher level thinking.   The personalization principle is necessary so that the learner will put forth more effort to learn the presented material.  By incorporating these e-learning principles, students will have a better chance of success since they will not be overloaded with irrelevant information.

 Reference:

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011). E-Learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumer and designer of multimedia learning (3rd ed.) San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.