Thus far in EDTECH 513 – Multimedia, the class has focused on how to create messages using multimedia that provide meaningful visual messages and leverage modalities of information acquisition, primarily sight and audition, for the creation of effective learning artifacts. The Personalization Principle, as described by Clark & Mayer, provides a means for further customizing elearning materials to the needs of specific groups of students or a single student, depending on the situation.
What is the Personalization Principle? It is a tripartite principle that seeks to bring the human into elearning environments.
First, this personalization is achieved by promoting the use of an informal communication style and a friendly human voice in elearning. According to this tenet, instructors should strive to provide a casual communication style that is balanced with professionalism. It should be neither so casual that students fail to take the class seriously nor so formal that they feel utterly disconnected from the human instructor. Voice quality and politeness, suggesting rather than stating, for example, is also strongly supported by research. It is also important to avoid sounding monotone or robotic, as this offers a much less engaging learning environment. People prefer other people. The literature also suggests that standard accents promote learning more so than foreign accents.
Avoid sounding robotic.
The second tenet of personalization is the use of on-screen coaches to engage students and help facilitate learning. These coaches do not need to be human. Nor do they have to be animated. Coaches can look like people, or they can take the form of animated objects or fantastical creatures. The most important factor to keep in mind is what will work best for the learners. Once again, make sure the “voice” of the coach, either written or spoken, is authentic. The point is to offer an interaction opportunity with a genuine conversational quality.
The third and final tenet of the Personalization Principle is support for author visibility. In many cases, writers of educational material are encouraged to be invisible and stay out of the learner’s access to the content. However, research into personalization has revealed that a visible author provides a distinct benefit to student learning. Authors of elearning materials can reveal themselves by using an interview style instead of reporting information or by including themselves in examples. This is similar to using “I” statements in a physical classroom as you work through a live problem or activity. I do this regularly in my library instruction classes. “When I conduct a search and I do not see the results I expect, here is what I do…” is a very common thing for me to say.
As I worked through the assignment, I made sure to follow the other multimedia principles I have learned about this semester. For example, I adhered to the Redundancy Principle by keeping extraneous text to a minimum, opting instead to use still images and let the text already present in the images suffice.
There are some open questions that remain concerning personalization, but we do know that personalization helps students engage more deeply with elearning courses.
As far as this particular assignment, we were tasked with creating a digital storytelling artifact. However, since the assignment was rather flexible, I chose to create two digital stories: one lesson and one personal. The lesson teaches the Personalization Principle explicitly while following the tenets established in the principle itself and the personal story is the story of how I came to be an academic librarian. The story is mostly complete, but that is understandable given the three minute duration limit for the assignment. I will continue to develop my digital storytelling skills and incorporate this powerful tool for elearning into my role as an academic librarian.
By completing this activity I have demonstrated an understanding of and have met AECT Standards 3.1- Creating and 3.2-Using. As for Standard 3.1 – I created a digital story wherein I presented content that was presented in a personalize (informal/casual) manner in alignment with Meyer’s description of the Personalization Principle.
As for Standard 3.2 – I created a script, researched and selected images, and learned how to use software that provided the optimal conditions for learning based on principles, theories and effective practices.
Reference:
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning.
Lance McGrath: EDTECH Learning Log 