The night before an IB Biology test, I am distraught by the amount of information I am unclear about. Upon posting a Facebook status and tweeting about my distress, to whom do I turn?
Salman Khan.
Salman Khan is the creator of the project khanacademy.org, a site that holds over 2,700 videos—topics covering calculus to history—all taught by Khan.
The site also includes numerous lessons in biology. I watched one ten-minute lesson on oxidative phosphorylation, and the subject became clear to me.
What I primarily learned from this experience was not the usefulness of Khan’s videos but the usefulness of learning and understanding information from any instructional video.
The method seemed to work for me, but why is that?
The answer comes from research done on multimedia learning, based on one prime advocate, BrainPop.
Its research reports that multimedia learning can be effective in three key ways: when it activates prior knowledge, is interactive and under the control of the learner and allows the learner to be engaged with the presentation.
What made a video from Khan Academy effective is that each video did these things.
In the beginning of the video, Khan often builds off of a basic concept. For example, in a video about derivatives, he would build off the concept of slope. This helps activate existing schemata (organizing structures in the brain that help sustain long-term memory and allow incoming information to be absorbed easily) and create new schemata. With the fast forward/rewind feature, the pace of a lesson can be controlled. Thus, this can give the learner the ability to regulate the rate of incoming information.
Throughout the video, Khan uses a particularly conversational tone that can engage the learner better. He also employs a story-like format to his videos, regardless of the topic.
Engagement also helps to activate existing schemata, allowing for the absorption of more information into long-term memory.
However, these aspects that make multimedia learning effective can be integrated into a lesson in school.
A live school lesson can activate prior knowledge and engage students through a story-like format fairly easily; as for controlling the pace, this too can be applied.
Breaking up lengthy broad topic discussions into shorter segments also allows information to be separated and processed at several intervals, as opposed to processing all information in one segment.
In my classes this year, I have in fact seen each one of these methods implemented in some lessons. In IB Topics of 20th Century, my teacher begins the lesson by talking, for example, about the basic concept of the role of the federal government in a society.
From there he goes into the topic of the Great Depression, breaking it into segments of the Roaring 20’s, Hoover’s response, etc. Finally, throughout the lesson, he uses language familiar to students to keep a conversational tone and a story-like format.
If all teachers utilize these methods in each and every one of their lessons, I believe the information taught will be less likely to go in one ear and out the other.