Eight guidelines for the design of instructional videos for software training

Purpose: Video has become a popular means for delivering "how to" information about a wide variety of software tasks. With video rapidly becoming a major instructional method, the question arises of their effectiveness for software training. This paper provides a set of eight guidelines for the construction of instructional videos for software training. Method: The guidelines present a concise view on how to design an instructional video for software training. They are based on a considerable body of research on how people process visual and verbal information and how to support these processes. Each guideline is described, illustrated, and supported with research findings from various disciplines. Results: The guidelines were tested in three consecutive empirical studies. In these studies a set of instructional videos for Word's formatting options were designed. The effects of the video instructions were compared with a paper tutorial (Van der Meij & Van der Meij, in preparation). We found that the video instructions yielded more favorable appraisals for motivation, higher skills proficiency immediately after training, and better skills retention after a one-week delay. Conclusions: The guidelines offer patterns that could further advance the theory and practice of the design of instructional videos for software training. A limitation of the study is that we concentrated on instructional video that serve a tutorial function. For video that function as a reference guide not all the guidelines are equally important, and also some new guidelines may be called for

Enhancement Student Understanding Through The Development Of Lab Module Based On Constructivistic

Experimental focuses learning on developing the skills of student in the process of knowledge, discover and develop their own fact, concept, and values required. The way to make it is by doing  modification to the practical guidance module had been given. Nowadays, practical guidance tend to emphasize on the explanation, so its use both practical and follow the path that has been presented. The practical guidance module should be modified based on constructivism. The module is an experimental guidance to environmental laboratory subject. The test material consists of water and wastewater sample with parameter of chemical oxygen demand (COD), total dissolved solid (TDS), and nitrate. The results showed progress in the cognitive aspects such students' ability to predict the concentration of COD sample. The greater COD concentration of wastewater make the color of mixture is blue-green. The student could communicate the calibration curves correctly. Hypothesis skills presented at TDS testing. The greater of the sediment, the greater the concentration of its. The same thing happened on COD testing, COD levels can be estimated earlier. The skills show an increasing such as the skill to ask questions, experiment planning skills, skills in using tools/materials, accuracy in data retrieval, seriousness and cooperation in conducting the experiment

Distributed information resources and embodied cognition in software application training : interaction patterns in online environments and digital games

Research on software application training has been predominantly based on the premise that the user builds an internal functional model of the system. This view of cognition as purely internal has been challenged by studies showing that experts do not remember the exact commands required to complete a task if they are not in front of the computer. Display-based competence suggests that a flow of information takes place between the display and the user, who only holds the necessary information to understand the visual cues and act accordingly. Distributed cognition, however, does not address the perceptual and motor actions necessary to acquire the information from the world and act on it. Embodied cognition attends to this gap. The Soft Constraints Hypothesis suggests that at the 'embodiment level', users will choose between cognitive, perceptual, and motor operators based on a cost-benefit analysis, the cost of the resources measured in milliseconds. It was hypothesized that resources in different environments with various access costs would influence use patterns, and learning strategies and performance. For the purpose of this study, participants completed a 5-lesson course in Flash animation concepts. 50 participants were then assigned to two practice environments that contained a software simulator built based on visual cues and salient task features displayed by the real software. The two practice spaces manipulated the nature of, and access to, information resources, with one featuring game-like task completion. Every action taken during the study was tracked and time-stamped, producing a log file containing around 20,000 records for subsequent analysis. The results showed that information access cost in online environments for software training has a clear impact on the strategies employed, the learning processes engaged, and learning outcomes. Traditional statistical analysis showed significant differences in declarative knowledge of rules, efficiency, and accuracy between groups. These results were complemented with data mining techniques to analyze user sequences as departures from an optimum path. The idea of a dual-learning process taking place when users are learning interactive behaviors, for example command sequences, was supported. A declarative-to-procedural process takes place in low-cost single-task environments whereas in the specific case of educational games, information access cost and concurrent game tasks can trigger a non-attentional cue-based behavior that results in higher task efficiency and accuracy, but has a negative impact on rule verbalization. A design framework for instructional environments mapping instruction-specific resources and their access cost to specific learning processes and outcomes is presented based on findings