Picture this: you are a secondary school teacher. The warning bell has rung signalling the last students in the halls should scuttle into class. You are at your station, attempting to get settled for your second prep. Three students are attempting to ask for bathroom passes, four more need their accommodated assignments, someone is trying to skip class to hang out with the football coach while the majority of your students are chatting in their seats, trying to sneak phones and in the midst of this barely-organized chaos you get asked “I was gone yesterday, what did I miss?” 

This question is one I am asked with increasing regularity. While it is relatively simple to hand out a worksheet or instruct a student to read a few pages from the textbook, catching a student up on a lecture often feels like an uphill battle. I usually do not have the time to go through all the points again, and my slides rarely reflect the full amount of information shared during the lecture. To address this problem, I wanted to explore ways for students in a traditional brick-and-mortar classroom to learn asynchronously if they missed the information, or even provide opportunity to go back to the lecture for reference or review purposes. 

However, to make sure students could actually learn from an asynchronous opportunity, I needed to explore how to better utilize technology and principles of design. Many of my students will not flip through a long slide deck, while others will find ways to be distracted if a video is not engaging. 

To keep myself on track and ensure I created an artifact that was actually effective for my students, I created the following objectives for myself:

• I can apply Mayer’s 12 Principles of Design to one of my presentations to create a more effective and engaging experience for my students 
• I can create a video of the redesigned presentation for students to learn from asynchronously

I chose to work with one of the few lectures I give in my intro to drama class.

Looking through the slides, I noticed a few issues with the design itself. A lot of the slides were text heavy, or included different points that should have been broken up into separate slides. In a face-to-face setting, students would likely struggle with the amount of text, so I knew students would struggle with it in an asynchronous setting. 

Therefore, in my first iteration, I focused on Mayer’s 12 Principles of Design, cognitive learning through multimedia, and WCAG accessibility guidelines. Specifically, I wanted to improve coherence, work with the modality, segment the information, and personalize the delivery (Cullinane, 2023). By cutting out extraneous information, reducing the amount of text, and focusing on the video format, I hoped the design would keep student attention, and improve the likelihood of students remembering the information (Mainero, 2020). With this lecture, I needed students to realize they can apply some of the skills they learn in English class to theatre, and then assimilate this knowledge into their schema for analyzing a play (Cherry, 2024). In an asynchronous format, I knew I could increase these odds by giving audio and visual cues (Mainero, 2020). Storing the information in long-term memory could further be helped by the visuals in the video, so I used WCAG guidelines to ensure proper contrast, and additional design principles of proximity to make sure the slides were logically ordered and accessible (Moore, 2025; W3C, n.d.).

In this video, I used my voice to increase personalization. I have found in the past students appreciate my voice compared to whatever videos I can find on Youtube or Khan Academy. When I taught the Iliad for example, students would wait for me to record myself reading the assigned books, rather than use the the audio I found on YouTube. Therefore, I went into this knowing I wanted to record myself.

Additionally, I broke the information into smaller segments to help attention and retention (Cullinane, 2023). I explored different editing styles, but ultimately ended up using Canva’s match and move to create simple yet effective animation. I now had a video that worked visually but lacked interaction. I knew most of my students would need some sort of worksheet to ensure they paid attention to the video. To me, this defeated my original purpose. 

I went back to the drawing board. I had experimented with Genially in the past and wondered if I could use it to drive engagement, and also provide precise pages for students to use for reference. When I made my first Genially, students liked that they could pop around to the pages they needed, rather than have to scrub through an entire video, or scroll through slides. Though the free version questions are not as customizable as the premium version, students liked that the knowledge checks were embedded directly into the presentation.

With these past experiences in mind, I researched how to connect Canva to Genially and imported my slides to Genially to make them more interactive.

Compared to my last time working with the program, I built the course from the ground up. I figured out how to add tool tips, windows, and assessment checks. While I originally wanted to learn a different video editing style, I discovered earlier that I favor clean and simple designs for accessibility and learning purposes, so I kept transitions minimal and did not add superfluous elements. Finally, I went in and added audio for each slide, so students can go through the information lecture-style, or mute the audio as needed.

Though it is not a true video, I prefer this final version to the first two. With this, students have the opportunity to “learn directly” from me via the audio recordings, or simply return to the material as needed. Ultimately, it was not too difficult to put together, and I could see myself creating these for other lectures that I give. The integrated knowledge checks can be used as formative assessments and also drive engagement. 

Now, when I am asked “what did I miss?” I can provide students with an effective opportunity to catch-up without adding stress to myself or taking additional time out of class. 

References

Cherry, K. (2024, May 13). What is a schema in psychology?. verywell mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-schema-2795873

Cullinane, E. [Instructional Design Tips]. (2023, March 7). Design principles for designing better learning content (mayers 12 principles) with emmett cullinane [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/aewFpp75q9I?si=MxrveOjOrOtLmygl 

Mainero, R. [Rachel Mainero]. (2020, October 6). Understanding the cognitive theory of multimedia learning [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/pxTbZffhIhQ?si=nAjpugT6H8Lq5hGh 

Moore, E. (2025, September 28). Simple, high-impact visual design principles every instructional designer should know. eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/simple-high-impact-visual-design-principles-every-instructional-designer-should-know 

W3C. (n.d.) Introduction to understanding WCAG 2.2. Web Accessibility Initiative. https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/intro#understanding-the-four-principles-of-accessibility