Ashlee's Teach Create Motivate

Learning is just a click away but font size matters… There are variety of online tools and educational platforms providing content through a computer screen. Visual design elements provide the content embedded in colors, different fonts and scheme, all those can effect learners’ performance in recalling information.  Once the text is well organized in terms of paragraph style, size of font, text line spacing, and word length, the readers’ performance in ability to recall information referring to readability ( Hojjati & Muniandy, 2014). Hence, computer based instructions such as online courses or tutorials are crucial to engage learners effectively and to contribute one’s meaningful learning. In addition, it is indisputable that students’ screen time is getting higher with the generation of new apps and media tools day by day as well as making them socially distant from others and isolating them from face to face environments. Here is the reason why texts are important i...

Multimedia is an engaging and motivating way of introducing a wide range of material. However, coordinating the visuals with the target message is needed to be designed well organized in order to deal with cognitive load in working memory. The principals for multimedia learning which was developed by Richard Mayer, who is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2001.   He suggested that words and graphics are more effective than the words alone. Let’s have a look at the diagram about “middle ear” as shown below (figure 1), what might be wrong with the diagram in terms of cognitive load theory? The answer is clear that it leads you to waste a lot of cognitive processing, and it includes a lot of words and it is hard to coordinate the words with the graphic referring to the “spatial contiguity” as defined by R. Mayer. In addition the words in the diagram should be given just next to the graphic. As an instructional designer or a lesson ...

The need for a bridge between basic learning theories and educational “outcomes has long been discussed. In order to build a bridge between learners and the learning, a comprehensible, well planned and organized material design are needed in foreign language teaching. This bridge is connected by our working memory where it takes us   o the theory developed by John Sweller in the late 1980s named as “Cognitive Load Theory”.  Cognitive Load Theory builds upon the widely accepted model of human information processing . Information from your sensory memory passes into your working memory, where it is either processed or discarded. Working memory can generally hold between five and nine items (or chunks) of information at any one time. When our brain processes information, it also categorizes that information and moves it into long-term memory in which it is stored in knowledge structures called "schemas." These organize information according to how we use it and it c...