No-Nonsense Newsletter #8

Happy December!

Happy December, elearning designers and enthusiasts! ?? ??

?? Welcome to our eighth issue of elearningdesigner.org's No-Nonsense Newsletter. If you are new here, welcome!?

Who are we?

??? elearningdesigners.org is a team of L&D content creators working in the field.?

What is our mission?

Our mission is to help people of all experience levels design effective learning and training. We make educational research easy to understand and use.?

Whether you are a teacher, corporate trainer, instructional designer, or just someone interested in learning design, you've come to the right place! We release new content *almost* each week on our website, elearningdesigners.org! If you want to engage with us, you can follow us on our LinkedIn company page, join our new LinkedIn Group, and subscribe to our YouTube channel to find out when new wisdom drops!?

Catch our?exclusive interview with Dr. Richard Mayer!

On November 15, we interviewed Dr. Richard Mayer on his multimedia principles and how they relate to accessibility.

Dr. Richard Mayer was named the #1 most productive educational psychologist in the world in Contemporary Educational Psychology. As of this video’s release on December 06, 2022, his work has been cited 192,563 times on Google Scholar alone. We are so lucky and appreciative to have had this opportunity to interview one of Learning Science’s brightest minds and a true living legend in the educational world.

In the interview, we asked him whether his principles and accessibility can coincide and what an ideal "dream world" might look like. We learned more about the learners involved in the research that led to the creation and continual re-validation of Mayer’s Principles. We also got to explore common misinterpretations of his principles and have a deeper discussion about the importance of understanding boundary conditions and why the principles should not be interpreted as singular sentences in isolation.?

Richard Mayer’s latest edition of his book is on Amazon and Cambridge Press. Want to learn more about Richard Mayer’s multimedia principles? Check out our book chat on Mayer’s Principles and Accessibility, as well as the posters and carousels that we have created for each of his principles on our Infographics page.? We now have the aggregate poster with all 15 Multimedia Principles published and ready for you to download!?

Brand New YouTube Video: Virtual Reality with Dr. Richard Mayer!

Join us for the second installment of our discussions with Dr. Richard Mayer, released just yesterday, December 21! In this interview, we ask him about his ongoing research, specifically in immersive virtual reality or VR. Mayer has been researching VR for many years, and we discuss one of his latest publications in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, "The Promise and Pitfalls of Learning in Immersive Virtual Reality.”?

In this paper, Mayer and his co-authors, Guido Makransky and Jocelyn Parong, state that "a pitfall of learning in immersive virtual reality is that high immersion can create distractions in the form of increased emotional arousal and increased levels of interesting but irrelevant perceptual richness."

Listen in as Richard Mayer responds to the question, "Given the duality of IVR being both engaging and distracting, what can learning designers do to reduce distractions while trying to retain engagement?"?

Get involved with the elearningdesigners.org LinkedIn Group!

elearningdesigners.org launched a LinkedIn group in November! This group is an intellectual safe space where you can post questions and initiate conversations to us and other group members. Don't be shy! ?? Invite your L&D friends and colleagues. The more the merrier! ????

?? Team Member Spotlight

You’ve seen our content, but who helps make the magic happen? We’d like to spotlight our team members to give you a chance to get to know the people behind the scenes!?

Today’s member is our Founder, Cecil (pronounced Se-SILL)! We thought it would be fun to do this in a mini Q&A format...?

Question: Why did you start elearningdesigners.org?

Answer: Well, when I finished my master's program (which took me forever since I was working full-time and going to school part-time...) I struggled for?two years trying to land my first ID job. ?? It was a horrible experience, but I finally got the hang of it. Originally, I just wanted to help other people who were also struggling to break into the field, because I felt like I had no support. If this sob story sounds interesting, you can read an early article I wrote about our story called elearningdesigners.org's Hello, world!??

Question: Richard Mayer is a big deal, how did a tiny, young organization like elearningdesigners.org get to interview him?

Answer: Great question! I ask myself the same thing all the time. ???? To be completely honest, I wanted to email Richard Mayer for at least 2-3 years before I finally got the guts to do it! That's kind of embarrassing... But to answer your question, I reached out to him initially to ask him whether the technique of highlighting text primes only the cognitive process of "selecting" or whether it can also prime the cognitive process of "organizing." At that time, we had just released the Signaling Principle poster, and I was worried that our example was not perfectly accurate so I wanted to clarify. I should ask his permission to post our correspondence.?Anyways, I guess we started sharing with him the posters that we created and gradually built up to our first call which became the three installments of our interview series (the third installment will be published in the new year). Since then, I've gotten to know him a little better, chat a little more. It's mindblowing ?? to exchange ideas with someone who has dedicated most of his life to the important research of learning science, and specifically optimizing the use of multimedia to support learning.?

Question: elearningdesigners.org's mission seems to have evolved since its inception in August of 2021, can you bring us through that evolution?

Answer: Sure! Our organization has indeed evolved and we've had lots of talented people grow with us as well as "graduate"?? to different adventures ?? and chapters in their lives. In the beginning, Dana (our most recent and esteemed alum) and I were working on a project for a startup to provide her with some ID work experience. Dana does not come from a traditional ID background so if you want to read about how she got into the field, check out the Oppti Case Study and the New IDs Panel video.?Originally, we were kind of like a blog about Instructional Design theories and concepts... and we were trying to grow a community on our own website. What we learned was that there are a lot of L&D and ID-specific communities already in existence, especially on social media. We decided to meet our community where they were... which was on LinkedIn. Full disclosure, we just haven't had the bandwidth to branch out on other platforms as much, but that's all changing in 2023 with our big focus on YouTube! We kind of went from trying to build a community to engaging communities, primarily on LinkedIn. We made an intentional shift to focusing on content creation and hosting live events... but there could always be more in store for the future! I don't want to give anything away, but we have an exciting collaboration in the works.

?? Wrap Up

Thank you for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on our LinkedIn company page, and join our new LinkedIn Group!

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