 We've all sat through boring PowerPoint presentations where the speaker reads slide after slide of on-screen text. Bad e-learning works much the same way. Learners are forced to sit through minute after minute of on-screen bulleted lists, text blocks, and paragraph-sized chunks of text. They may or may not have the pleasure of listening to someone read each of those paragraphs aloud. So it should come as no surprise that there's a better way. Mayer's multimedia principle tells us to use words and pictures instead of just words alone. This is a foundational principle for all good e-learning design. Let's look at it in action. Say you have a client who needs to teach his employees how to follow the steps in a process. He's using a common stacking toy to demonstrate how important it is to do each step in the correct order. We sent you this content slide for development. Now you could develop this very simply by having the narrator read each step and use an on-screen fade to display each step as it's read. Assembly instructions. Unpack the stacking cups. Place the blue cup on the bottom. Place the green cup on top of the blue cup. But that's not very effective learning. If you watched this slide and then had to complete a quiz about the process, did you remember where the green cup goes? And what the final cup color was? Probably not. If the point was to teach a process, you'd more than likely fail. Not because the content isn't accurate, but because it wasn't presented in a way that encouraged learning. The multimedia principle teaches us to use pictures to support learning. So let's take another look at our assembly instructions after we've applied the multimedia principle. Assembly instructions. Unpack the stacking cups. Place the blue cup on the bottom. Place the green cup on top of the blue cup. Place the red cup on top of the green cup. Finish by placing the yellow cup on the top. Using a simple picture, adding arrows to show the placement order, and putting the text in a color that matches the color of the cup, all work together to improve learning. It's a simple way to combine words and pictures that effectively teaches this process. Now I bet you'd have a much easier time remembering which cup went where and what the final cup color was. The picture reinforces the content and improves knowledge transfer. All e-learning developers can use the multimedia principle every time to develop impactful content. It can help make your e-learning modules more engaging, improve knowledge retention, and avoid the dreaded on-screen text death. Stay tuned for the next module in our Design Basics series.