Adding Media Contributes to Student Learning

Incorporating media components as part of your course content produces many benefits for instruction and student learning. Whether you are delivering course information through face-to-face lecture or an online course, media helps sustain the audience’s attention, as well as offering different perspectives to improve comprehension of the content. Using assorted forms of media enhances the learning process by merging text, verbal, and visual information that promotes engagement and retention.

Everyone processes information through a mixture of our various sensory perceptions. In essence, we are all multi-modal learners, and even though there may be a personal preference for a certain learning style, we all learn more effectively when information is presented in multiple formats. Allan Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory (1971) is a long-standing and well-supported educational principle that maintains learning increases when textual and visual information are combined. These two different pathways of receiving and coding information begin to supplement and connect to one another, which broadens our mental associations. Presenting content as a combination of words and visuals creates two different mental representations that link together to increase retention. One of the reasons that videos are an engaging and effective form of communication is because they present a mixture of media formats that extends descriptions and connotations. In effect, including multimedia elements into the delivery of course materials can provide various viewpoints and contexts about the information, which promotes additional insights as well as deeper learning.

This list of websites offers a list of media resources available for instructors. Many of these sites and resources are free and open for instructional use. However, it is best to check into any copyright information or restrictions by visiting the Copyright and Fair Use guidelines available through this LCCC Ludden Library libguide.