Organic chemistry

Video Lectures
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Video Lectures

Popular instructional videos have such different styles, and there is no consensus in research about how to make the most effective instructional videos (Renkl, 2021). Videos can differ in whether or not we can see the instructor, presenting text as spoken and/or printed, and the overall layout. Sometimes, the layout is dependent on the topic. Math courses often have worked examples, and topics in the humanities may be presented as narratives. Table 1 is a non-exhaustive list of videos from well-received YouTube channels.

Reasons to Use (or to Avoid Using) an Image

Reasons to Use (or to Avoid Using) an Image

Images can be effective for explaining concepts that cannot be described adequately in words alone (Ainsworth & Loizou, 2003). The terms “image,” “picture,” and “graphic” in this post refer to static visual representations that include, but are not limited to, drawings, photographs, microscope images, and screenshots. Choosing images to include in the course material is not trivial because having more pictures does not always mean better learning.

Voice
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Voice

Instructors have the option of lecturing with the human voice or a computer-generated voice. In a study involving a lecture on lightning formation, students learned better from the recorded human voice than the Microsoft text-to-speech software (Atkinson et al., 2005).

Student-Generated Drawings

Student-Generated Drawings

Incorporating drawing as a learning activity to accompany textual information can be helpful for meeting learning outcomes compared to no drawing (Leutner & Schmeck, 2021). According to the drawing principle, the exercise of drawing allows students to engage in generative processing (Leutner & Schmeck, 2021) of text by establishing complex spatial relationships (Fiorella & Mayer, 2021).