Learning Through Animation Is The Best Way To Learn

Education is changing from being teacher-centric to student-centric.  This shift creates several ripple effects on the subject matter, educational tools, student-teacher interaction, and student motivation.  This revolutionary shift is creating a generation of capable children that are impacting the world at a very young age.  The access to information and the use of several new instructional design methodologies are creating learning modules that are highly engaging and effective.  

The animation is one such medium and this methodology is gaining popularity and usage amongst educators.  The use of story-telling and scripting is a fresh take on the traditional class lecture which revolves around theory and examples.  Animation captures the gist of the lesson and infuses it into a medium that children just can’t get enough of. ¹

Animation, however, is not just about watching or listening to a video.  It is so much more in PIE – The Complete Learning App created by Praadis Institute of Education; it is used as an interactive tool similar to how Dora the Explorer captures student attention by creating the illusion of being a video within a video on a computer screen or as an instructive 3D model that is used as a reference while conducting an experiment or even a sing-along type animation.² It can be an all-around useful tool that incorporates all VARK modalities.  Study-time is not what it used to be, it’s so much more.  

Animation is also affecting the way students and teachers interact.  Previously, teachers served only as lecturers and helpers in solving a given set of problems.  Currently, the role has changed into a role of coach or guide that only nudges or makes suggestions when necessary during the course of students’ discovery learning.  The increase in student excitement, motivation, and engagement allows for this shift in teacher interaction³

Students are drawn to these types of learning modules.  They show heightened motivation to learn and also a higher level of conceptual understanding due to animation⁴. Here is a list of techniques used by PIE, an educational app for students, to increase understanding and motivation: 5

• Use of short, concise, videos

• Use of a conversational style narration

• Narrator’s speaking rate (enthusiasm and speed) directly impacts students’ engagement

• Use of both auditory and visual channels, in complement, to deliver information

• Use of guiding and embedded questions during videos to increase students’ active learning and discovery-based learning

• Segmentation or chunking of videos increases accessibility to specific concepts for repeated viewing and also creates an outline or organization of the learning material

References:

1. Turkay, S., & Mouton, S. (2016). The educational impact of animations: An experiment using popular social science lessons. In Proceedings of the MIT Learning International Networks Consortium.

2. Agina, Adel M., (2003). Education Animations. Retrieved [1-06-2019] from http://institute-of-progressive-education-and-learning.org/elearning-i/elearning-educational-entertainment/education-animations/

3. Thomas, M. P., Turkay, S., & Parker, M. (In Press). Explanations and interactives improve subjective experiences in online courseware. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning.

4. Brame, C.J. (2015). Effective educational videos. Retrieved [1-06-2019] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/.

5. Guo PJ, Kim J, and Robin R (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. ACM Conference on Learning at Scale (L@S 2014); found at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/other-pubs/las2014-pguo-engagement.pdf