How to make online learning more effective: Experimental evidence from Russian

We compared the acquisition of information from an online lecture depending on the format of information presentation. In the experiment, participants listened to four fragments of an online linguistics lecture presented in different formats: (1) auditory text without visual support; (2) auditory text accompanied by slides containing verbatim written text; (3) auditory text accompanied by slides presenting a summary of the content; and (4) auditory text accompanied by slides containing both a summary and illustrations. The combination of auditory and visual information proved more effective than audio alone, while summarized text was more effective than verbatim written text. The presence of illustrations supporting the text influenced participants’ subjective evaluations of the presentation format but did not significantly improve the reliability of information acquisition.