How do you boost student engagement with multimedia?

2 Integrate multimedia with other activities

Multimedia is not a substitute for instruction, but a complement. You need to integrate multimedia with other activities that engage your students before, during, and after viewing or listening. For example, you can activate prior knowledge, set a purpose, ask questions, or make predictions before using multimedia. During multimedia, you can pause, summarize, clarify, or check for understanding. After multimedia, you can review, reflect, apply, or extend the learning. These activities will help your students process and retain the information better.

3 Balance multimedia with text and speech

In order to ensure effective communication with your students, you should use multimedia in moderation and in conjunction with text and speech. To avoid cognitive overload and confusion, you should adhere to some principles of multimedia design. This includes aligning multimedia with text and speech, reducing extraneous multimedia, segmenting multimedia into manageable chunks, and signaling the key points or features of the multimedia that are important for your students to notice and remember.

4 Adapt multimedia to different learners

Multimedia can appeal to different learning styles and preferences, however, it can also create barriers for some learners. To ensure accessibility and equity, it is important to adapt multimedia to different learners. This can be achieved by providing captions and transcripts for audio and video, alternative text and descriptions for images and animations, and multiple options and formats for multimedia. Doing so will help students who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind or visually impaired, have difficulty with language comprehension or visual perception, or have different devices, bandwidths, or preferences for learning.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?