Page 10: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (September 2022)

Training Tips for Ships

Tip #39

Basic Principles of Ef ective

E-learning design ast month’s Training Tips for Ships advocated for corresponding words and pictures are presented near each the idea of building your e-learning content in- other rather than far from each other on the page or screen.” house. The big advantage of building your own

L content is that your training is going to be more “Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better relevant, more engaging, and likely more effective. Plus, the when corresponding words and pictures are presented simul- process of developing it in-house engages personnel in the de- taneously rather than successively.” velopment and management of training, which creates buy-in.

Training is then something that everyone has a hand in, not The two preceding ones are simple common sense. For me- something that is imposed upon them. dia to work well together they must be presented together -

So with that, let’s look at the basics of good lesson design. closely related in time and location.

To do so, we draw upon an excellent paper commissioned by

Cisco Systems Inc. in 2008 and researched by Metri Group. “Coherence Principle: Students learn better when extra-

The paper is called “Multimodal Learning Through Media: neous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than

What the Research Says”. I recommend you read the entire included.” paper as it is full of useful information and is well presented.

Here I will quote and summarize some of the paper’s essential Again - common sense. Learning materials should get to the principles on good eLearning design. They are as follows: point and resist unneeded information. This is a strong argu- ment for creating your own learning content - content from a “Multimedia Principle: Retention is improved through generic library is sure to include information that is not ap- words and pictures rather than through words alone.” plicable to your operations. This wastes time and demotivates learners.

This makes sense. Adding images to text not only provides additional information, but does so using a media with differ- “Modality Principle: Students learn better from animation ent strengths. Text allows for deep and detailed descriptions. and narration than from animation and on-screen text.”

Images help in context setting and familiarization. The out- come is improved learning. This is an interesting result. Intuitively it makes sense be- cause both animations and reading (text) require visual at- “Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when tention. Using both in the same lesson likely tends to create © Tierney/AdobeStock 10 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • September 2022

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