Mandarine 101 Screencast

For this module, I created a screencast on Zoom. The topic I chose to teach is Mandarine for beginners. In the screencast, I explained how to use pictography to learn Chinese characters.

Principles in Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia that I have in mind when I were creating the screencast

Reduce extraneous cognitive load

In creating the screencast, I tried to reduce extraneous cognitive load by using Redundancy Principle, Coherence Principle and Contiguity Principles. According to the Redundancy Principle video , it is best to not overload the audience with too much information. Therefore, in my screencast, I only provided the needed information (eg. Chinese Characters and Image that could represent the characters).

According to the Coherence Principle video, I only kept information that is related to my topic. At one point I wanted to add the content about language changes in Chinese language, to show how Chinese characters evolved. I thought it would be helpful to show that ancient Chinese is based entirely on pictography. However, I later reflect that my audience do not need to know this content, even though it seems interesting. They are not learning about ancient Chinese characters, they are learning modern Chinese characters. Therefore, I shouldn’t distract them with another historical lesson.

According to the Contiguity Principle video, not only did I place words and graphic together, I tried to find the best graphic that audience could easily connect to the Chinese character.

Manage Intrinsic Load

I used segmenting principle to break down difficult task such as learning Chinese characters. For many, Chinese characters are difficult to write or remember. Every Chinese character has its individual meaning, and it seems they are not in anyways connected from a non-native speaker perspective. However, as a native speaker, I know how Chinese characters are related, therefore, I tried to show the relationship using pictography. Therefore, for this screencast, I went from simple character such as 人, to harder ones such as 众 and 天.

If non-native speaker see 众 and 天 up front, they may see them as completely different words with no connection in their writing. Therefore, it’s very important for me to introduce them that 人 could be the root word for both. This process involved the principle of pertaining, I build the foundation first and then allow learners to connect the dots themselves.

According to the modality principle, since I am not using language that my target audience (beginner of mandarine) is familiar with, I tried to explain everything inside my slides, and not overwhelm them with Chinese language.

Social Cues

In my screencast, I used personalization principle–I tried to engage the audience by using “I”, “we”, “let’s” a lot. I want the screencast to be like natural conversations. And the narrator is myself, a human voice is better than machine voice according to voice principle.

How did Imagined Audience impact my design choices?

After deciding that I want to teach mandarine, I immediately know that my audience should be non-native Chinese speakers. Since the screencast is limited in 2-5 minutes, I couldn’t teach advance mandarine because it would be very hard to set the foundation and then explain the topic in short time. Therefore, I imagined my audience to be beginners that are learning simple Chinese characters.

With this in mind, I don’t want to overload information to make the lecture on Chinese character harder as it is. Therefore, in designing the slides, I only included words and graphic (maximum 2 visual elements on one single slide). My narration also aimed at helping my learner to process the visual elements easier.

Summary

In summary, in this module, I learned that in online teaching, it is important for us to keep multimedia learning theory in mind. The design principles allow educators to tap into learner’s learning process. Providing too much information at one time does not mean that there’s more learning happening.

Please see my screencast below:

Works Cited:

Mayer, Richard. E. The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139547369

“Redundancy Principle“YouTube, uploaded by Wisc-Online, 1st June. 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qz9cIaWOhw

.”The Coherence Principle” YouTube, uploaded by Wisc-Online, 31 Oct. 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTyr9P15JhI

“The Contiguity Principle” YouTube, uploaded by Wisc-Online, 31 Oct. 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Di3rw-t0BI