If you speak and use PowerPoint to show words, pictures, charts/graphs, video, etc. you teach with multimedia. If you speak and write on a chalk board or dry-erase board you teach with multimedia. If you have a book for your course that uses pictures, charts/graphs, etc. you teach with multimedia. Understanding the cognitive effects of what is being presented and how it is being presented can help you manage the demands of cognitive processing in your students and can help prevent their cognitive overload. By doing this you can vastly improve your students ability to learn.

Over the next few months, I'll be recording @5min videos on Mayer's twelve principles of design for multimedia learning: Coherence, Signaling, Redundancy, Spatial Contiguity, Temporal Contiguity, Segmenting, Pre-Training, Modality, Multimedia, Personalization, Voice, and Image. This recording will focus on the first principle: Coherence, which focuses on the reduction of extraneous information in order to assist cognitive processing.