My Process

To ensure that learners do not suffer cognitive load, and to ensure that each explainer video was the highest quality possible, I kept Mayer's 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning in mind in each explainer video's creation.

Coherence Principle: Because our working memory can get easily overloaded, people learn better when unnecessary "fluff" is cut out, so I made sure to only include content that learners needed to know to change their behavior. The same is true when it comes to adding background music to instructional videos: background music overloads our working memory and actually reduces our ability to learn. It's for this reason that I decided to exclude background music from my explainer videos.

Signaling Principle: I included limited text on screen in order to point out what exactly the learner should look at. This reinforces learning and limits cognitive load.

Redundancy Principle: Because adults learn more effectively from visuals and narration instead of visuals, narration, and on-screen text, I kept on-screen text to a minimum with the exception of including captions on each video to ensure that deaf/hard of hearing people can access the learning content.

Segmenting Principle: Our attention spans are short, and our working memory can only remember so much. It's for this reason, and because it's good andragogy, that I decided to give learners control over their own learning; learners can navigate the course at their own pace and are not required to "memorize" anything and fill out a knowledge check. I also divided the content into chunks. Our brains tend to zone out after around 5 minutes of instruction, so I ensured that each explainer video was under 5 minutes long (most were under 3 minutes).

Pre-training Principle: During the analysis stage of the ADDIE process and I was figuring out what the "need-to-know" for each course was, I realized that not everyone may understand what D.E.I. is. Without that background knowledge, it can make the rest of the course much more difficult to grasp. 

Multimedia Principle: Our brains are visual based, so it makes sense that people learn better with words and with images. I included B-roll footage in each video to demonstrate this. Specifically, in the Microaggressions course I used a true story to illustrate the consequences of a toxic workplace culture, and so I animated this story to create emotional appeal because the learner would most likely remember the animated visuals of the story over a narrator explaining it.

Personalization Principle: It's much easier to engage in new content when you don't have to fight to understand what's being taught, so I made sure that each script had a more conversational tone as opposed to a professional, formal one. 

Voice Principle: People learn better when they're listening to a friendly human voice instead of a robotic one, which is why I decided that using a real person as my narrator would work better than using a costly AI presenter. 

Image Principle: People do not necessarily learn better by a human narrator; however, human narrators do set the tone for the instruction, so this is a fine line. Keeping this principle in mind, I decided that "less is more." The on-screen narrator is present in each explainer video, but I included lots of stock video footage to illustrate the points being made.