Hi everyone! My name’s Mary and I’m currently in my third year of Health Information Science. In the past, I had the opportunity to take EDCI338, which I enjoyed. Fast forward to now, I have the same opportunity to take more EDCI courses! I’m looking forward to working with everyone!
My Screencast
For my screencast, I decided to run a sample pitch from a past course project. I used Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), which is a free open source software for video recording and live streaming. At the time I created these set of slides a semester ago, it looks like I had unknowingly applied Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning. For example, the signaling principle is demonstrated through bolded titles such as the slide that contained the characters “Quality. Scale. Reputation”. The spatial contiguity principle is also seen throughout the slide deck, as specific symbols are closely associated visually with their represented texts. Unfortunately, I did realize that the redundancy principle and the coherence principle were lacking. I believe the slide that contained information about the University of Victoria had too much text on top of my narration, which caused a lot of repetition and unnecessary information to be displayed to the user.
What Stood Out To Me
Upon reading the different principles of multimedia learning, particularly with minimizing extraneous load, it only confirms that this kind of process is challenging. Coming from the background of health informatics, I’ve learned that plenty of physicians struggle with decision fatigue and alert fatigue from health information systems due to extraneous load. That is, some health professionals are purposely overriding and disregarding important information because of the display of irrelevant and incorrect information. It may be best that healthcare can learn specifically from Mayer’s redundancy principle and signaling principle so that physicians do not have to sacrifice their cognitive load and potentially result in making poor health decisions for their patients. Fortunately, the research behind the usability of health information systems have been making gradual improvements to existing systems (e.g., electronic health records, clinical decision support systems). This has come in the form of displaying proper color schemes, box sizes, and content type that are much more useful to the end-user. In doing so, doctors have a more enjoyable time utilizing the systems available to them, all while creating better decisions.
You did a great job presenting the screencast Mary! I agree with your opinion on how the study room booking system is decentralized at the University of Victoria. The decentralized system is quite frustrating to use and I liked how your sample pitch tried to tackle that! Also, after seeing you mention using Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for your screencast I decided to use it as well and found it to be very simple and easy to use. It was also interesting that you unknowingly applied Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning. In regards, to the redundancy principle, I can relate as I found that it was common to have redundant information in both academic and professional settings. Your blog post was well-organized and detailed. I liked how you provided links to the different principles. The links made it easy to quickly reference the material you were referring to. Overall, your blog post was enjoyable and interesting to read. I look forward to reading your future posts!