For this week’s coursework I chose to watch a 30-minute instructional video, the second one in a series. Chef Jonathan Collins teaches the fundamentals of French cuisine and demonstrates how to use several products from Cuisinart.
Analysed with the perspective of the Meyer and Moreno 2003 reading:
Positives:
Segmenting: breaks the 30-minute episode into four clear parts, which are first communicated in the video title.
Signaling: Each part is announced with a signal at the beginning. The recipe of what he just prepared appears. You need to pause and take a screenshot because it only appears for a few seconds. There is no talking when the screenshots appear but the music continues.
Off-loading and Synchronising: The chef talks in a conversational style whilst he is demonstrating the technique– close-up camera to the slicing but there is still a voiceover.
Pre-training: Chef Collinss reviews the julienne and bruniose cuts from Episode 1 whilst dicing red pepper and mango.
Analysed with the perspective of the Mayer and Moreno 2000 reading:
Split-attention principle: no text appears during the demonstration and chef narration. Sometimes you see this in videos used as a way to reinforce the principle being taught, but according to Meyer and Moreno it produces additional cognitive load.
Negative:
Coherence principle (Meyer and Moreno, 2000): There is accompanying music looping during the chef’s demos which is irritating and distracting. This adds cognitive load as I try to listen to what the chef is saying.
Recommendations for improvement:
- Provide a link or attached reference summarising the concepts for the viewer, as well as the recipes.
- Comments are disabled for the video. It would be interesting if YouTube had additional comment types available only to logged-in users, where they could ask questions or interact with each other. This would move the instructional design also more in the Connectivism direction.
Sources:
Cuisinart Canada, & Collins, J. (2017, November 22). Cuisinart Culinary School, Cuisinart Canada Episode 2: Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs and Spices. Retrieved November 21, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ZZaRC_F3E
Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning. EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 38(1), 43-52. Retrieved November 16, 2017, from http://faculty.washington.edu/farkas/WDFR/MayerMoreno9WaysToReduceCognitiveLoad.pdf
Moreno, R., & Mayer, R. E. (2000). A learner-centered approach to multimedia explanations: Deriving instructional design principles from cognitive theory. Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal of Computer Enhanced Learning. Retrieved November 22,2017, from http://imej.wfu.edu/articles/2000/2/05/index.asp