Image Principle Practice
Teachers, professors and students sometimes record themselves to produce lesson videos. However, many of such talking-head videos they produce have many of design flaws.
This is an in-class group assignment designed to help students understand the image principle more in depth. The image principle is about when and how you should appear in a video presentation. For more information about the image principle, please refer to the reference below.
Source:
The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, 2nd Ed.
ISBN: 978-1107610316 (paperback), $71.25 ASIN: B00JXIICDC (Kindle), $39 In-depth explanations about the theories of multimedia learning backed by research-based evidence.
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Mayer, R. E. (2014). Principles Based on Social Cues in Multimedia Learning. In R. E. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (pp. 345-368). New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Procedures
This is how this exercise goes (see Figure 1):
- Each group creates eight slides by using Google Slides (see ❶).
- Each group shows their slides in the presentation mode (see ❷), which is automatically projected into the OBS Studio (see ❸).
- Student(s) is being recorded in the portable green screen studio that I have set up in the classroom (see ❹), which is simultaneously streamed to the OBS Studio with the green background keyed out (see ❺).
- The end result is a weather forecast style live streaming video. We look at it and discuss how well the presenter is integrated in the video.
What Students Learn
As each group presents their "live green screen + slides" video, the whole class discusses how well the presenter is integrated in the video. Through this exercise, students learn the following guidelines:
- You must produce enough social presence when you show yourself in the video.
- You can show yourself in the video if pointing gestures are needed.
- In some cases, animated visual cues are better than pointing gestures.
- You can show yourself in the video if you are not distracting viewers from learning.
- You should show yourself in the video when there is nothing important to look at on the screen.
- You might as well show yourself in the video when the onscreen visual aid is poorly designed and does not function as visual aid.
- You must not exhibit negative social cues when you show yourself in the video.
Design Criteria for Slides
Students creates the total of eight slides for this exercise. Four of them are just title slides, and the remaining four are content slides. Here are the criteria for the four content slides:
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