The opportunities of using Multimodal to enrich the learning experience for students are seemingly endless, but how can we take advantage of it best? And how does New Media play into that?

I think one key factor here is to recognize new ways of keeping students attentive to the content you present by using different media. Having more variety in the students' learning experience can impact the remarkability tremendous and make it easier to remember details on subject matter.

Simply using a video that shows a talking head presentation is creating a visual impression as well as a vocal impression, but it is still not adding value compared to a classical classroom presentation. Now, you could change the angle of view from time to time in order to create another visual impression that makes an interruption and re-focusses the attention.

But you could do so much more, like for example add text that appears every now and then. Pictures that illustrate a narrative, which is connected to the piece of information you are about to share. Changing from Talking head presentation to slides and then back to Talking head will create a complete shift and you hear the presenter's voice while having bullet points to orientate, at which point of the material you are. What will be coming, what did I already understand? As a student, having an idea, what to expect for the rest of the course, feels liberating, because you reached a milestone to look back on the achievement and motivates for the rest that is ahead.

So in my opinion, we take most advantage of multimodal, if we take these tools in practice to enrich the learning experience instead of just recording our lecture and share it online.

Would love to read, what you think in the comments. Thanks.

Marc van Treeck