Engaging students through multimodal learning environments : the journey continues

The innovative use of educational technologies provides higher education institutions valuable opportunities for their staff to design media enhanced, interactive, more inclusive and engaging learning environments. The key motivation for incorporating educational technologies into the curricula is unquestionably the desire to improve the engagement and learning of students. To assist with this the increasing use of multimedia in teaching has provided many opportunities to present multiple representations of content (text, video, audio, images, interactive elements) to cater more effectively to the different learning styles of an increasingly diverse student body. This paper presents the findings of an experiment to measure the impact of multiple representations of content on learning outcomes, including learning performance and engagement. While, in this study, multiple representations of content did not lead to discernable improvements in learning performance, students reported very favourably on multimodal learning elements and perceived that they had assisted their comprehension and retention of the learning material. The implication of this study for educators is to consider carefully the incorporation of selected multiple representations of key concepts, particularly those that use a combination of audio and visual content. The limitations of the experimental methodology and directions for future research are also presented for consideration