I am very pleased to announce that a colleague (and former student of mine) Dr. Jongpil Cheon at Texas Tech University and I will have a new paper published in an upcoming issue of Educational Technology Research & Development journal.  The article is part of Jongpil’s dissertation work while he was with me at the University of Memphis, pursuing his [...]

Over the next few days, I will be attending the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital‘s Cure4Kids Global Summit.  (That’s a mouthful!)  A description from the website says: The aim of this three-day conference is to improve health and science education in classrooms and communities around the world. It will bring together leading educators, innovators, and pioneers in a multidisciplinary forum [...]

If the fun from yesterday with the graphic communications majors at Clemson University wasn’t enough, today, I get to discuss cognitive load theory and web based instruction with graduate students and faculty in the Psychology department here at the university. I’m a little nervous about this talk, because I haven’t presented this before. This is a line of significant research [...]

The Internet has taken us beyond our wildest dreams. At the beginning of the Information Age there were the select individuals called “Webmasters” that had the skills to publish to the Web. Over the past decade, everyone has had tools at their disposable to create a presence with ease. I admit I was caught up in the rage to try online instruction. My first experience was in 2003 and my intent was to provide a convenient way to provide instruction to a small group of learners. My first mistake was letting the medium be the determining factor rather than focusing on the design of the content (Rovai, 2002) …

I am a visual learner. I would rather look at a chart than read a text. I would rather watch a video than read about its content. However, this is my own learning preference and it is not a general rule for learning. It is nice to entertain the idea of tailoring instruction to all the different styles of learners but, in reality, this is not practical. What is practical is designing instruction that uses a mix of text, audio, video and images, also called multimedia. This has been proven to accommodate the different learning styles of the learners and help them learn better.