Evidence-based principles for how to design effective instructional videos.

Drawing on research conducted by Mayer (2020), this article examines evidence-based principles for how to design effective instructional videos and shows how they are grounded in cognitive theories of learning and instruction. Principles include multimedia (present words and graphics), coherence (avoid extraneous material in slides and script), signaling (highlight key material), redundancy (do not add captions that repeat the spoken words), spatial contiguity (place printed text next to corresponding part of graphic), temporal contiguity (present corresponding visual and verbal material at the same time), segmenting (break a complex slide into progressively presented parts), pre-training (provide pre-training in the names and characteristics of key concepts), modality (present words as spoken text). personalization (use conversational language), voice (use appealing human voice), image (do not display static image of instructor's face), embodiment (display gesturing instructor), and generative activity (add prompts for generative learning activity).