Using Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Design to Guide AI-assisted Course Design
AI tools have become an instructional designer’s best friend for accessing multimedia for course design. If we step back, “Does AI’s quickly generated content align with quality multimedia content? Is including multimedia in a course as simple as prompting, downloading, and uploading? This session explores how Mayer’s principles of Multimedia can be a framework to guide and evaluate AI-generated multimedia.
Participants will critically analyze four AI-generated multimedia samples using Mayer’s principles of Multimedia as an evaluation framework.
- Scripts: ChatGPT (Coherence & Personalization Principle)
- Visuals: DALL-E 3/ MidJourney AI (Spatial Contiguity & Signaling Principle)
- Audio: ElevenLabs (Voice Principle)
- Video/ animation: Synthesia (Segmenting & Modality Principle)
Participants will then explore prompt engineering, learning strategies to design better prompts to generate quality multimedia that aligns with Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia.*
This session uses the instructional strategies Compare and Contrast, Concept Attainment, and Inductive learning to design the content and interactive activities.
Session Objectives:
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Evaluate AI-generated multimedia using Mayer’s Multimedia Principles as a framework.
- Compare and contrast AI-generated content to recognize quality vs. poor quality multimedia.
- Apply prompt engineering strategies to improve the quality of AI-generated multimedia.
Interactive elements and technology:
- Lucid whiteboard/ Miro: for multimedia compare and contrast activity.
- Chat feature and emojis: to share responses and vote.
- Live AI demo tools
AI Acknowledgement: Portions of the interactivity section were created with support from OpenAI. All AI-generated material was reviewed and refined by the author, Pattiya Shenila Peries to ensure alignment with my personal ideas for the topic of the proposal.
Pattiya Shenila Peries, California State University – Fullerton, US
Pattiya Shenila Peries is a graduate student in the Instructional Design and Technology Program at California State University, Fullerton, where she is expected to graduate in May 2026. Her academic interests focus on adult learning theories and the creation of accessible, inclusive training materials.
In her role as a Quality Control Specialist at Legacy FM (Facilities Management), she helps ensure quality standards across training and development materials.
