A Demo Calculus Lesson
While I was working on the calculus course described on the Calculus Course page, I discovered a very interesting and useful book by John Sweller, called Instructional Design in Technical Areas. Several of the ideas in this book seemed very relevant to what I’d been doing, so I decided to experiment with them in the context of a demo calculus lesson. |
Sweller’s basic principles are intended to reduce cognitive load for learners – the amount of material the learner must maintain in working memory to solve a problem. The most interesting of these principles concerns the use of voice instead of printed text to present material: since printed text must compete with other material on the page or screen for attention from visual working memory, it is preferable to present the textual part of learning materials aurally instead, since aural working memory is largely separate from visual working memory. There's adownside of using voice, however: the voiceovers have to be scripted, recorded, managed, downloaded and edited. The eventual development of software for TTS (text-to-speach) should help with this issue. |
The demo is in the form of an interactive PDF file, and is fully annotated to illustrate the application of voiceovers and other pedagogical ideas. Further discussion of these ideas and others highly relevant to the design of onscreen materials can be found in the book, Efficiency in Learning, by Ruth Clark, John Sweller and Frank Nguyen . |