zmWmQs

Friendly Handmade Explanation Videos
Jörn Loviscach
viding rules. Roam (2008) provides guidelines on how to
organize ideas into free-hand sketches. Summarizing his
extensive research, Mayer (2009) proposes several principles
for multimedia-based instruction, most of which
are naturally fulfilled by explanation videos as discussed
in this paper.
The Bigger Scope
The trend to abandon challenging textbooks and lectures
and to embrace easygoing explanation videos has some
perils: Students may not learn how to work with less
“friendly” material; they may not develop the grit (Duckworth,
2013) needed for advanced tasks. One may even
argue that a primary objective of higher education should
be to equip the students with the ability to work with “unfriendly”
material.
It has long been known in educational research that
learning requires work. This is the rationale behind “desirable
difficulties” (Bjork & Bjork, 2009) and the “amount
of invested mental effort” (Salomon, 1984). However,
rather than making explanations indigestible, in a MOOCstyle
course one can offer quizzes to reach the required
level. (A different question is whether or not the audience
accepts difficult quizzes as parts of a course, in particular
in the setting of a MOOC. This is a tricky issue.) Another
caveat: Slick explanations may falsely confirm students’
misconceptions if no special precautions are taken
(Muller, 2008). And, finally, as huge numbers of “thumbs
up” for pseudoscience videos on YouTube demonstrate,
a substantial part of the audi-ence may be deceived by a
misguided or even malevolent application of principles as
the ones described above. Even the (hopefully) reduced
content and unconvoluted style of explanation videos
may be prone to hiding non-sensical statements behind a
seductive presentation as known from the Dr. Fox effect
(Natfulin, Ware & Doenn-ly, 1973).
The Bigger Scope
Dead symbols on the page of a book or on a PowerPoint
slide – or vivid, conversational explanation videos To
most students, this is an easy choice. This paper has presented
a range of ideas how to create such friendly ex-planations
by pointing out didactical approaches and sharing
ideas for the implementation in terms of graphics. Some
of the guidelines can be applied in isolation, for instance
in textbooks. Implemented with video, they can help produce
explanations that are friendly in terms of both visual
style and didactics.
develop good explanations. As the quote that is (mistakenly)
attributed to Albert Einstein goes, “If you can’t explain
it simply, you don’t under-stand it well enough.”
References
Adams, D. (1979). The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. London: Pan
Books.
Alsop, A., & Beale, S. (2013). Molasses or crowds: making sense of the Higgs
boson with two popular analo-gies. Physics Education, 48(5), 670–676.
Amar, H. (1957). New geometric representation of the Lorentz transformation.
Amer. J. Phys., 25, 326–327.
Bjork, E.L., & Bjork, R. (2009). Making things hard on yourself, but in a
good way: creating desirable difficul-ties to enhance learning. In M. A.
Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology
and the real world (pp. 56–64). New York: Worth Publishers.
Duckworth, A. L. (2013). True grit. The Observer, 26(4), 1–3.
Goodstein, D., & Goodstein, J. (2000). Richard Feynman and the history
of superconductivity. Phys. Perspect. 2, 30–47.
Harrison, A. G., & Treagust, D. F. (2006). Teaching and learning with
analogies. Friend or Foe In: P. J. Aubus-son, A. G. Harrison & S. M.
Ritchie (Eds.) Metaphor and analogy in science education (pp. 11–24).
Dordrecht: Springer.
Khan, S. (2012). The one world schoolhouse: education reimagined. London:
Hodder & Stockton.
Loviscach, J. (2013). The Inverted Classroom Model: Where to go from
here. In: The J. Handke, N. Kiesler & L. Wiemeyer (Eds.) The Inverted
Classroom Model, The 2nd German ICM Conference (pp. 3–14). Munich:
Oldenbourg.
Mayer, R.E. (2009). Multimedia learning. Second Edition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McCloud, S. (2006). Making comics. New York: William Morrow.
Muller, D.A. (2008). Designing effective multimedia for physics education.
PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, Australia.
Naftulin, D. H., Ware, Jr., J. E., & Donnelly F. A. (1973). The Doctor Fox
lecture: a paradigm of educational seduction. Journal of Medical Education
48, 630–635.
Ngo, H.Q. (2012). Contribution to: Mathematics: What are some of the
most ridiculous proofs in mathematics http://www.quora.com/Hung-Q-
Ngo/answers (as of Sept. 13, 2013)
Roam, D. (2008). The back of the napkin. New York: Portfolio.
Salomon, G. (1984). Television is “easy” and print is “tough”: the differential
investment of mental effort in learning as a function of perceptions
and attributions. J. of Educational Psychology, 76(4), 647–658.
Tufte, E. (2001). The visual display of quantitative information. Second
Edition. Cheshire: Graphics Press.
Wikipedia (2013). Tangent space. http://en.wikipe
The informal style takes much work out of graphics
production and video editing. Thus, hopefully, even more
effort can be invested in the content and the didactics. In
my view, way too much time is spent on preparing presentation
slides and far too little time is used to search for and
Experience Track |244